Business Visualizations
Timeline Shows the Top 10 Most-Visited Websites Each Year Since 1995
Although the internet was officially created in 1983, it did not become popular worldwide until the mid ‘90s. During the World Wide Web’s infancy, sites like AOL, GeoCities, Yahoo!, Netscape, and MSN ruled supreme. I have fond memories of using Infoseek and Lycos for research in school! Over time, the way humans interacted with the internet evolved, and with it, the most popular websites. A2Hosting.com has created this simple and striking visualization of the top 10 most-visited websites each year since 1995:
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Here are the top 10 most-visited websites each year in 1995:
| Rank | Website | Monthly Visits |
| 1 | AOL.com | 37,485,000 |
| 2 | Yahoo.com | 32,612,000 |
| 3 | Geocities.com | 16,922,000 |
| 4 | Netscape.com | 16,075,000 |
| 5 | Webcrawler.com | 12,239,000 |
| 6 | Excite.com | 8,376,000 |
| 7 | Prodigy.com | 7,948,000 |
| 8 | Infoseek.com | 7,026,000 |
| 9 | Lycos.com | 6,849,000 |
| 10 | Compuserve.com | 3,283,000 |
And here are the top 10 most-visited websites each year in 2023:
| Rank | Website | Monthly Visits |
| 1 | Google.com | 83,800,000,000 |
| 2 | YouTube.com | 31,400,000,000 |
| 3 | Facebook.com | 16,100,000,000 |
| 4 | Instagram.com | 6,600,000,000 |
| 5 | Twitter.com | 5,900,000,000 |
| 6 | Baidu.com | 4,800,000,000 |
| 7 | Wikipedia.org | 4,300,000,000 |
| 8 | Yahoo.com | 3,400,000,000 |
| 9 | Yandex.com | 3,200,000,000 |
| 10 | WhatsApp.com | 3,000,000,000 |
As you can see, the only site that have survived the test of time is Yahoo.com, although it plummeted from 2nd place to 8th place. Why is Yahoo still around? Many people still have Yahoo email accounts, so that explains some of the traffic the website receives. Yahoo is also popular for its robust fantasy sports community. Google has dominated first place for most-visited website since 2006. Do you think Google will ever be replaced as the most popular website on the internet?