Almost 30 years have passed since Berners-Lee published the first website on August 6, 1991. The publication of the site http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html took place at CERN, European Organization for Nuclear Research. From that August 6, a few weeks passed before an external user visited the site. Three decades later, the World Wide Web has become an increasingly popular site. Today in the world it is assumed that there are 1.83 billion websites. But what are the top ones in the world by traffic? And how has the top 10 most visited sites in the world changed from 1996 to today? Let’s find out in this new article!
Most Popular Websites in the World – 1996/2021
We saw how the first site was created almost 30 years ago. And we mentioned how to get a first view the site took weeks and weeks. But today what are the most visited sites in the world? And what are the traffic volumes? According to the data in the database Similar Web the most visited site in the world for traffic is Google. The U.S. company, born September 4, 1998 in California, in the month of March alone (2021) had over 92 billion views. Thanks to this data Google is positioned in first position detaching a lot the other sites. In fact, in second place we find Youtube with over 33 billion users and Facebook in third place with 22 billion and 550 million. These first three sites, Google, Youtube and Facebook, absorb a total of over 148 billion traffic in March alone. A very impressive figure.
After the first three positions we find to follow Twitter, and Instagram, with over 6 billion traffic and Wikipedia and Baidu that are close to 6 billion. Another step lower, but still in the top 10 with over 3 billion, Yahoo *Vidoes and Yandes. Finally *nxx which closes the ranking with 2 billion and 600 million monthly traffic.
Most Visited Websites in the World 1996
If we move the hands of the clock back to January 1996, it is interesting to note two pieces of data. The first, as you can easily imagine, concerns the total data. AOL, which in January 1996 was the most visited site in the world with over 90 million users, has far fewer total views than Google in 2021. But so far nothing surprising. The other interesting fact to note is how among the top 10 sites in the world in 1996 only Yahoo has remained over 25 years. Yahoo in fact already in the early years of the birth of Websites was one of the most used sites in the world. After 25 years Yahoo is still at the top of the charts. As we have seen in fact is positioned in March 2021 in eighth position with almost 4 billion traffic.
Top Websites in the US by Traffic
And in the United States, what are the most visited sites in the world? If above we saw the data on a global level, in this case we see the data for the U.S. In first position, also in this case, we find Google. Google has in fact a total of 17.98B visitors. The majority of these, 67.18%, more than 2/3 of them are via mobile. While 32.82% are via desktop.
In the top 10 positions we find Google, as mentioned above, but also Youtube, Facebook, Amazon, Wikipedia, Yahoo and Reddit. Reddit is the seventh most visited site in the US with 1.28B visits. Unlike Google, 65.34% of visits are via Deskotp (total of 838.62). Page views per session are 4.2 and visit time is about 20 minutes. In terms of visit time Youtube is the first site in the United States with an average value of 30 minutes and a Bounce Rate of 50.77%. Twtich has an average value of 27:47 minutes, slightly lower (about 3 minutes).
Yahoo vs Google vs Facebook
In the video above we saw how Yahoo has held up over time and how Google, once it got to the top spot, never gave way to anyone again. In the graph I made below I decided to compare 3 giants: Yahoo, Google and Facebook over time.
We need this graph to understand the trends over time. Yahoo for example, as we said above, compared to the other 2 was born much earlier. And although it is declining, in terms of total views, compared to 2010, is continuing to maintain a good ranking compared to the top 10. Google instead, except for some particular moments, is in constant growth since it exists. Different trend instead for Facebook: from 2018 onwards it is slightly decreasing. In general, however, it is interesting to see how these 3 big giants have challenged each other over time.
Sources and data
Source: Similar Web
Video link: https://youtu.be/qxCmNlK959Y
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