Most Popular Websites 1995 - 2023 

1998: Yahoo refused to buy Google for $1 Million 2002: Yahoo refused to buy Google for $5 Billion 2017: Yahoo sold to Verizon for $4.4 Billion 2023: Google market capitalization is $1.28 Trillion

half of those google visits were from me typing words out that I dont know how to spell

I thought Amazon and Netflix overall would have been higher on the list in the last decade and was really surprised they didn't make a bigger jump in 2020

Being born in 91 and seeing some of this literally happening before my eyes but not “seeing the big picture” until seeing this video is crazy. I remember when MySpace was HUGE

Imagine living in the world where people would say “Just Yahoo It”

Crazy that Google, RU-vid and Facebook have been the three dominant forces of the internet for a decade now

I still remember the day my high school librarian told me about Google back when it first launched. It was so unique because unlike every other site that was flooded with noise (text, photos, pop ups) it was so clean and straight forward.

The amount of ASK Toolbars I've had to uninstall from customers computers while working as tech support explains how they could stick to the top 10 for so long...

I remember when Yahoo was the dominant force, and the idea of anyone taking them over seemed impossible. The lesson: In business, nothing lasts forever.

I loved the addition of the important facts throughout the timeline, man! As always, great work!!

Sad and frightening how much one company has control over what data we’re exposed to and affect our thought processes so much

Data IS beautiful! You’ve done a wonderful job visualizing it. Thank you.

What surprises me the most is the amount of people going on Yahoo even in the late 2000’s early 2010’s. I didn’t even know that website was still being massively used that way.

AOL… “Welcome! You’ve got mail!” and a CD-ROM install disk in the mail every other week. Ah yes, the good old dial-up modem days. I can still hear the sounds!

I got online in 1996 and remember all those old names. Loved Netscape Navigator. The sudden decline of Geocities in 1999 is interesting and they closed it 10 years later. I used that a lot and web pages were easty to create. No video sites in the 90s as was on dial-up amd everything was slow to load, but seemed normal back then.

This is actually a pretty interesting timeline to see. I still have my AOL account that I created back in the 90s. Even though I do have Google email my AOL is my primary one that I still put on applications or what not as the best way to email me even to this day.

This timelines are excellent! Suggestion to the channel’s development team: sometimes you get a bit lost in the relative movement of the bars, when some are growing slower than others and, even though they are still growing, they start to shrink. You could display another dimension of data by putting the growing numbers in blue and the falling ones in red, or put an up or down arrow beside them (I’d prefer the colors, though). Thanks

AOL was bigger than Google, Amazon, Ebay and Yahoo combined at the end of 2000, according to this video. For those not there at the time it is hard to describe its dominance. There is nothing like it now. No one thought they would ever be knocked off their perch since they had been the most visited site every month for the previous 6 years.

Again, another fascinating and somehow therapeutic presentation. I’m subscribing!

It's interesting to see this information and look back at what I was doing at that time (which wasn't much because I was a kid), but kids after the internet boom will never, ever experience this phenomenon and will never understand or appreciate what it is and how it affects us everyday. They can learn about it, but to people like me who grew up with the internet and seeing things for the first time *ever* and watching it grow, adapt, and improve exponentially, it's indescribable

Frankly it's great to have made a statistical video on the different websites that have marked the history of the internet thank you to you.👏👏👏👏

You know, it's crazy. I've left sort of time capsules for myself in the form of saved files going all the way back to my very first computer back in 2002. Before that, I had n64 and ps1, and my mom had a NES. It's insane to think about where we are today, and where we'll be in just 5, 10, or even 20 years. The world is going to be unrecognizable.

Turns out the internet is _not_ 90% porno.

I kept expecting to see a huge increase in Amazon traffic during 2020 🤔

japan is singlehandedly still keeping yahoo alive

Only Yahoo stayed consistently on the board start to finish. What a fighter

Remember seeing those free AOL trial CD-Rs in the checkout line at Walmart in the 90s?

A+ video! Fascinating trends and it is so much easier to understanding after seeing these visuals.

This low key hit me in the feels. Seeing Google rise, and take out MySpace, and watching all those OG websites just leave the list. Idk why that hurt LOL

It is even more impressive when you figure that Google has owned RU-vid since 2006, so you could combine the top 2 if we are looking at companies and their share of the market.

hi! love ur content, what program do u use to visualize this and all data? been looking for a good one but haven't been able to find it so far. Thanks for this great job!

This is an exciting data review! Thank you. 🙂 I remember those names clear back to 1996.

Crazy how Amazon started in 1996

I'll just say it: This background tune is lit.

i love these data stats. Please do more. More More. Love them and the music is so relaxing :-)

Got my first email address in college in the fall of 1994, and it was the first time I browsed the "world wide web" which was brand new to me and pretty awesome. I used AOL constantly after college from 1997-2007.

3:23 RU-vid enters the scene! 😊 Late 2005 is when I first discovered RU-vid and wasn't till September 2006 when I successfully made my 1st channel. Good memories... Those were the days ...

I'd give anything to go back to the glory days of MySpace. It was simpler times, man.

So crazy have every month and year replayed in my head on what I was doing at that time good times

As someone who got their start in Computer Science and IT, WAY BACK in 1985 (!!!), I appreciate an animation like this. I started in business retail IT sales in 1985 and went into corporate IT around 1990. Those damn AOL CD mailers littering my office desk. Asynchronous dial-up! MCI Mail. Got my employer on the web in 1994-1995 (?). Public IPs all the way to the desktops and no firewall! Saw the first attempts from malware and got firewall religion QUICK. Had no future as a stock investor, because having seen so many dial-up online environments come and go, I thought the WWW was going to be another fad that came and went. BOY DID I GET THAT WRONG!!! The chart spans nearly all of my career. I've seen SO many changes. The replacement of mainframes with PCs. The network. Micro PCs from every contender duking it out. The intro of the GUI. Portable PCs, laptops, handheld organizers, smartphones. Info everywhere in the palm of your hand! It's like I jumped on a surfboard back in 1985 and caught this wave that I've been riding for decades! In this time, life has happened. Got married, had children, got divorced, got married again, had children, got divorced, bought homes, built homes, got married again (!!!). This animation goes back so far that I can't help the feelings of nostalgia. Life is good.

I remember the glory days of Geocities. I thought I'd gotten into the game late and all the best websites were taken... in 1996! 🤣

I was literally just wondering when you were going to have another video come out. And I looked in there was a new one! Thank you!!♥️

Fantastic... Too good... Luv to see this data... ❤❤❤❤❤😮🙃😳🙂😃😀

I got on the internet in 97. I had Windows 3.11, Netscape, Yahoo as my homepage, and Hotmail as my main email. I used AOL messenger to chat people people, Yahoo chat rooms to meet people. I remember visiting websites written in pure java and needed JRE installed to view them. I remember the colors, and gif animations and the internet felt more like a multi-media machine in the late 90's than it does today.

The data is beautiful, indeed 💕

For most of the list, I was like : "There is no way the HUB is not in the top 10. "

Hello from france ! I wanna make a few bar race charts for study purposes. I have a question, where do you get the datas in all off tour videos ?

You can see clearly when the heyday of RU-vid was Vs today. The CEO from 2014 sadly killed the site thank God she's now gone. RU-vid has made it so difficult for creators now, so many hoops to jump through to be 'RU-vid Friendly'😥

I really appreciate the random important events reminders that pop up.

Glad you're back!

This is really fascinating stuff and great work pulling this together. It will be cool to see this in 2030 and beyond!

Would be interesting to see this in terms of revenue. I expect Amazon would be way higher.

Altavista, WebCrawler, Lycos, Excite... I had completely forgotten all those names. What a trip to my 20s.

So weird to think there was a time when Google wasn't even in the top 10. And AOL going from being the most popular ISP to being a cyber ghost town. Times really change.

I’m beyond astonished in wonder of how you manage to not only find and make these visualizations but correct them. Your contributions are fabulous, keep going dude!

Amazing video! Good job!

I have a dataset and I want to create some thing one of your line charts dude. Could use some direction on tools you use and how you get it that dynamic

This was fascinating.

So crazy I remember all those old search engines in the mid 90’s crazy how things and times change , great video

Blown away that not 1 but 2 adult sites are on this list that's crazy

Loved the early days of the internet the most. It was so exciting being online

Yahoo was extremely popular because of the chat rooms, like MSN for the messenger. I miss those days 😞

as an absolute nobody who has had over 2 millions visits through social media and my e-commerce sites (one man operation) it's insane to see top runners in late 90's have less than 10 mil visits. The internet has grown

Facebook is in free fall mode

Great work, can you please share the website/link to this dataset in CSV. Thanks.

Thank you so much for coming back after taking a break for a few years. Couple things: It seems like things become really unstable after 2020 for websites. Nobody is really increasing indefinitely anymore they are more so increasing, then decreasing, then increasing back and forth. Interesting. I wonder why that is? Then by 2022 it seems like most websites are in a slow decrease. It'll be interesting to see how the A.I boom of 2023 will start affecting this. I expect to see Bing increase dramatically if their new A.I browser proves to be better than Googles.

I admire how Yahoo kept on catching up to the top several times 😃

i remember everyone in my family used yahoo it’s crazy that they were so popular and now basically nobody talks about it

Been through all of this. Miss the good ole days. Old eBay, MSN messenger & old RU-vid when it was simple. What's an advertisement on YT? I remember when ad's did start though. Was getting lots of World Of Warcraft ad's, haha

I was just thinking to make video on this topic... And you did 🔥🤗

I think people are forgetting about Default Homepages- which are single handedly keeping sites like MSN and Yahoo on this list. I have, in recent memory, opened a homepage to both those sites (must have been a public computer or my parents or something). Now regarding the porn sites- I am frankly surprised they didn’t make the top 10 until the last few years. It’s kind of insane when you think about how much of it there is. Is the industry really that big? Or is it the same 100 stars with their 100 videos being pushed throughout? I’m gonna go do some research….

That was absolutely worth ten minutes of my day. I was really looking forward to seeing what happened around March through June 2020. Not as much as expected, but neat to see nonetheless.

Excellent video!!! 🤩

Excellent! Thank you.

Yahoo remains in the top 10 for nearly 3 decades 😮

Google's monopolization needs to be dealt with. Excellent work. Thank you, fellow human!

webcrawler was my favorite search engine back in the prodigy days.

Honestly AOL hung in there a lot longer than I expected. Shows how much of a flash in the pan MySpace was too.

I’m honestly surprised at how long aol stayed on this list. I graduated college in 2015 and no one I knew ever used aol. Also I would have thought Amazon would be much higher throughout this whole video. Interesting. Also also interesting that xxx sites were ahead of Amazon.

Thanks for the music track !

I first got on the internet summer '93 or '94. It was in the first 'internet cafe' in my city. I wasn't sure what the internet was for, and I definitely didn't know what I was doing, but I still remember that day. I think I paid US$3 for one hour.

Crazy that AOL hung in there until mid 2014. Didn't know anybody had been to that site in nearly a decade at that point

This is really cool. Where did you get the monthly historical data stretching all the way back to 1996, can't find this freely anywhere?

How can I design this video? With what program?

It's depressing it took me a minute to realize that wasn't a wild card but a censored letter. This definitely cleared up a bunch of confusion for me.

Social media creeping in 2000’s and onwards surely the worst thing that’s happen in my generations life time!

I was really surprised how long AOL stayed on there.

I remember when going on the internet was such a special feeling. The dial up tone, going to the library and getting your 15 minutes of time to see half a pixelated music video load, making a Winamp playlist, Napster… now the internet is a necessity, and it’s used for everything in our lives. It’s way too accessible and it’s incredibly toxic for children. Man do I miss making a geocities website everyday and learning html codes for my MySpace page….

Anyone else find this video to be incredibly relaxing to watch?

I remember getting my Facebook account back in 2007! It was nice back then, much simpler.

Secret about AOL. I used to work in the Bay Area/Silicon Valley late 90's through early 2000's... and we knew AOL was a fraud. They would advertise as being the fastest provider, when in fact they weren't. They would cache your visited pages on their servers so when you revisited the same site it would look instant. But in reality it never reloaded. We had huge issues explaining this to our customers at the time. Got yelled at a few times trying to explain it to people who could call in complaining our site wasn't updating. The site I worked for was called Onsale, an online auction way before Ebay.

Thats great, very fun. Thank you

My biggest surprise was when Yahoo made that one comeback.

The opportunity in the late 90s was mind boggling. We just have to imagine that a brand new opportunity exists with AI. Will Google be the new AOL? It's hard to believe that they could get any more dominant, so maybe Google isn't a safe bet anymore.

It's so interesting looking at this and having lived in that time. For instance I remember when Yahoo instant manager became huge and that made sense it over took MSN but then mid 00s it goes down

Hi there I too love a beautiful display of data, I was wondering what program is used to make these graphs in particular that move and "race" if you will. Did you develop this program and did you have to put the information in manually? Thanks anyone who can help me.

I miss Myspace so much

it's amazing how yahoo still managed to make a comeback to the top at the end of the decade 2000s only to be toppled the next month and at the beginning of the 2010s. rip yahoo, you're still my main email for 21 years though 😘

This video deserves to win some kind of award. What a masterpiece.

When broadband internet was introduced in the 2000s (Road Runner High-Speed Online, AOL Broadband, etc.), many people no longer needed to have their landline phone share a line with their slow dial-up connection. Broadband internet relied on the same coaxial cables that fed cable TV into your home in order to get you onto the worldwide web faster...