The animation, which has gone viral since it was posted on Reddit this week, shows the 10 most visited websites each month from January 1993 to January 2022
The Internet has changed a lot since 1993. Of the most visited websites in that year, most have disappeared or are a shadow of what they were and the visits that were then numbered in the millions are now in the tens of billions . This evolution is reflected in the video that the marketing firm Eeagli has created and that this week has gained virility after being published on Reddit, the largest forum on the Internet.
The animation shows, month by month, from 1993 to 2022 the ten most visited sites on the Internet, with their number of monthly users, and is a clarifying journey through the evolution of the World Wide Web and the role it has been playing in our lives. over three decades.
The 90s
During the 1990s, the America Online website was the most visited site on the Internet . What were then known as Internet “portals” and were websites that gave access to information and a wide range of services (directories, email, Internet providers, forums, chats…), attracted the visits of the majority of users.
In addition to AOL, which in 1993 had 20 million monthly users and closed 1999 with 363, Prodigy stood out (which also provided Internet service that at that time was charged by the hour, like AOL and others), Geocities (which allowed hosting web pages for users), Netscape (the dominant browser for much of the decade), MSN , and others.
At the end of the decade, more specialized information sites ( BBC ) and online commerce ( Amazon and Ebay ) appeared, but the other battle that was taking place was that of specialized search engines that went beyond what the previous ones offered. Yahoo quickly won the preferences of most users and remained the most used during the decade, but Lycos , Excite , Infoseek or Webcrawler , among others, were also protagonists in those years.
the 00
The 2000s began with Yahoo getting ahead of AOL as the most visited website in the world and the latter closely followed by MSN. Its decline has begun, but other players are emerging. Google enters the top ten in 2001 and in 2005 it is already in second position only behind Yahoo, which still maintains a great advantage.
That same year, Wikipedia and, for the first time, a social network, MySpace , entered the classification . The following year Google surpasses Yahoo, which has not yet said its last word. In 2007 MySpace becomes the third most visited site on the Internet and YouTube bursts in like a storm, just like Facebook in 2008. Surprisingly, that same year Yahoo regains leadership over Google, but the joy would only last until 2010.
the 10
The past decade was, of course, the decade of Google and social media. Search engines broke out again, now powered by powerhouses like China ( Baidu ) and Russia ( Yandex ).
Twitter entered the ranking in 2012, Instagram in 2014 and although in the middle of the decade Facebook seemed to have the first position within reach, Google began to mark distances since 2015 and the Meta social network was surpassed by YouTube in 2018. That same year it was puts as the tenth most visited place on the Internet, for the first time, a website with pornographic content, Xvideos . In January 2022, Google has almost ninety billion visits and its dominance is absolute, as was AOL’s and Yahoo’s at the time.
Eeagli uses data from Google Analitycs, Statista, SEMRush, Internet Archive and corporate reports to make the video.
