In this data visualization video I look at the most popular websites based on monthly visits, the industry standard when comparing websites. It does not take into account page views nor unique visitors. Some of the data includes approximate numbers as the data available skipped years.
I also include screenshots of certain sites from the list as they looked during that particular year. The websites in the thumbnails include:
1993 Apple
First Apple website
1994 Amazon
Featured book search and shopping cart
1995 WebCrawler
Most popular search engine in the mid 90s
1996 Excite
Purchased WebCrawler after it's IPO that year
1997 BBC
Official launch followed by rebranding to BBCi
1998 Google
Official launch
1999 AOL
AOL Desktop kept users on AOL properties
2000 Apple
Steve Jobs regains leadership as CEO
2001 eBay
Had largest userbase of any e-commerce site
2002 Walmart
First version of the site had launched a year earlier
2003 MSN
MSN Explorer displaying MSN page
2004 Yahoo
Search and landing page
2005 MySpace
Acquired by News Corp. in July for $580M
2006 MySpace
Allowed custom backgrounds and colors
2007 YouTube
Used as much bandwidth as entire internet in 2000
2008 Facebook
Introduced new design plus messenger
2009 Ask
Jeeves returns to the site
2010 Baidu
Becomes top search engine in China
2011 Amazon
Became the largest source of consumer reviews
2012 Amazon
Redesign and simplifying shopping experience
2013 MySpace
The horizontal redesign failed to captivate users
2014 Instagram
Started monetizing with video ads
2015 VK
Top social media site in Russia
2016 Twitter
The "verified" blue check-mark was unveiled
2017 Wikipedia
2018 Walmart
Acquired Indian company Flipkart in August
2019-2020 Facebook
Redesign plus a new "care" reaction emoji
Thank You
Which have been your favorite websites of all time?
