For most web users, Google isn’t so much
a ‘website’ as the gateway to the internet
itself.
So let’s get it out of the way: 40,000 search
queries per second, 3.5 billion searches per
day, and 1.2 trillion searches per year.
The most popular searches tend to be for websites
on this list, representing some of the biggest
names in ecommerce, entertainment, social
media, and general reference.
Here are the statistics behind them.
10.
Craigslist
Craigslist is roughly a decade older than
Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube and predates
even Google, having launched all the way back
in the Netscape/Windows 95 days.
And it looks it too.
Unlike every other site on this list, its
appearance hasn’t really changed a bit.
But that’s not all that sets it apart.
Despite its global reach and popularity—with
more than 700 local sites across 70 countries,
comprising 100 million ads and 50 billion
page views per month—the company only has
50 employees.
Since its launch, Craigslist has managed to
retain a charitable, almost anti-capitalist
ethos that extends far beyond its .org domain
name and “Ban the Bomb” logo.
Apparently, it only started charging for ads
as a way to root out spam from competitive
categories (e.g. Bay Area jobs, New York City
apartments, sex workers, etc.).
Most other categories remain free-to-post
as per the original mission.
But the site was soon pulling in $40,000 a
day from these fees, a profit Craig Newmark,
founder of Craigslist, says was purely accidental.
Indeed, he invests most of it in charity organizations
and causes like the Wikimedia Foundation (for
free knowledge) and the Poynter Institute
(for trustworthy journalism).
And while analysts say that Craigslist could
easily increase its yearly revenue to $6 billion
overnight, without even alienating its users,
simply by upping its fees, there are no plans
to sell out or even sell up.
As the idealistic Newmark puts it: “Death
is my exit strategy.”
9.
Netflix
Originally launched in 1998 for mail order
DVD rentals, it wasn’t until 2007 that Netflix
branched into streaming.
Since then, it’s become a movie studio and
television network in its own right, and a
major one at that, drawing criticism from
industry rivals.
FX CEO John Landgraf, for example, calls the
Netflix boom “Peak TV” and says there’s
just too much story to keep up with—a bubble
that will eventually burst.
Industry concerns aside, there’s definitely
something dubious about Netflix.
Not only has it successfully transformed “bingeing”
on TV and all that goes with it into a socially
acceptable pastime, it actually encourages
and celebrates this addiction by shamelessly
parading the stats.
In 2017, for instance, Netflix proudly announced
that January 1, traditionally a day for giving
up vices, was their most popular day for a
“comfort binge.”
As of July 2018, the site had more than 130
million subscribers, together watching more
than a billion hours per week.
And the year before, more than 5 million sat
through at least one whole series on the site—sometimes
for 12 hours or more—in a single 24-hour
period, a phenomenon the ‘pushers’ at
Netflix cynically refer to as “binge-racing.”
And this is almost certainly underplaying
the true number, since Netflix counts only
individual subscribers and not the number
of people in the room—or others on the same
account.
8.
IMDb
Acquired by Amazon back in 1998, IMDb had
already been around for almost eight years,
or 10 if you count its days as a Usenet group.
Amazon wanted to integrate the site into its
own to drive up their sales of new movies,
and paid $55 million for the database—all
before Google existed.
So apparently Col Needham “sold out” long
before 2017 when he dropped the site’s bustling
message boards.
Nowadays, IMDb claims to attract more than
250 million visits a month and has roughly
the same number of pages, including 5 million
titles.
But only 10% of them are movies; the majority
of titles (more than 3 million of them) are
actually just TV episodes—leaving some to
wonder why it isn’t the “ITVDb” instead.
The site also boasts more than 20 million
actor pages, less than 12.5 million actress
pages, 6.7 million images, 3.4 million videos,
and 3.5 million reviews.
Many people check IMDb before deciding to
watch a film and reject any with less than
six stars.
However, the voting system isn’t nearly
as straightforward as it seems.
The site actually rigs the ratings in a number
of different, mostly secretive ways—like
making new users’ votes count for less.
IMDb also has a disproportionately high number
of male voters and a bias for movies aimed
at men.
At the time of writing, the top five movies
of all time, apparently, are The Shawshank
Redemption, The Godfather, The Godfather:
Part II, The Dark Knight, and 12 Angry Men.
7.
Reddit
Although Reddit bills itself as “the front
page of the internet,” it actually has a
fairly niche audience: 58% aged 18-29 years
old and 69% male.
As of mid-2015, only 7% were 50-64 years old
and a mere 1% were 65+.
Still, despite getting just 10% of the traffic
of Facebook, Reddit is now the fifth most
visited site in the US.
Worldwide, it boasts more than 330 million
users.
It was founded in 2005 by a pair of college
roommates who ran fake accounts to make it
look busy.
But it wasn’t until 2008 that users could
make their own subreddits—a feature for
which Reddit is best known.
Today, there are nearly 1.2 million of them,
140,000 of which are active, and, as early
as 2015, there were more than 1.7 billion
comments.
Another key feature of Reddit is the Reddit
AMA, which stands for “Ask Me Anything,”
a special type of thread allowing direct question
and answer sessions between users and interesting
people, including scientists and politicians.
The most popular AMA ever was Barack Obama’s
on August 29, 2012, attracting 3 million page
views on the day and many more millions since.
By the time it was archived, it had accumulated
216,000 upvotes and more than 23,000 comments.
6.
Amazon
In many ways Amazon represents the brave new
world of internet-driven civilization—its
growth often described as a hostile takeover
or an ambush of physical stores.
But it’s actually much older than you might
think.
Having launched in 1994, it’s one of the
oldest continuously operating websites out
there.
It launched its affiliate program all the
way back in 1996, the same year that it sold
its first shares.
And this was a time when less than a fifth
of Americans were on the internet and only
a third even had computers—so it showed
extraordinary foresight (or very clever planning)
from Jeff Bezos.
By 1999, Amazon added music, DVDs, video games,
software, and home improvement products to
its initial offering of books.
The following year, it launched its marketplace
for third-party sellers and by 2003 was selling
pretty much anything we searched for.
So Amazon can hardly be thought of as new;
in fact, it’s older than 40% of mankind.
In America, more than 43% of online retail
sales are processed through the site, which
means 43 cents of every single dollar spent
online—all 385 billion of them—passes
through Amazon’s hands.
It should come as no surprise, then, that
it’s worth billions of dollars more than
Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Macy’s, Kohl’s,
Nordstrom, JCPenney, and Sears combined.
Shipping something like 3.3 million orders
in a day, it mails enough cardboard packaging
to bury all 50 states in just under five normal
months.
And it takes more than 125,000 bullied employees
(and tens of thousands of robots) to fulfill
that many orders across 75 centers in the
US.
As it rolls out delivery by drone, Amazon
now has plans to take some of these warehouses
to the sky, constructing huge floating airships
that will somehow cut down on costs.
5.
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is huge.
The English version alone has more than 5.6
million articles—3.2 billion words—and
continues to grow at a rate of 497 articles
a day.
Of course, the strength of Wikipedia is its
continual, open-source refinement over time,
and it currently averages around 2 edits per
second.
Since it launched in 2001, it’s had well
over 848 million.
Yet despite its noble aims and meticulous
attention to detail, the internet’s most
popular general reference website is still
widely seen as unreliable.
A 2014 study looked at ten of Wikipedia’s
medical articles and found that nine were
full of inaccuracies—an especially worrying
statistic given that up to 70% of doctors
and medical students admit to using the site.
However, that study itself may have been flawed,
since it called out at least one mistake (against
peer-reviewed journals) that Wikipedia actually
had right.
In fact, Wikipedia has a dedicated team (and
special guidelines) just for their medical
pages.
Unlike many peer-reviewed journals, it works
proactively to eliminate bias.
And it’s not just in medicine; Wikipedia
works to ensure the utmost reliability right
across the board—which you can read about
in its very own, almost 15,000-word article
on the “Reliability of Wikipedia” itself
(locked, at the time of writing, to avoid
vandalism and unreliable edits).
That said, it does note one major drawback
of its open-source approach right at the top
of the page: In 2008, a 17-year-old student
edited the “South American coati” page
to include a nickname he’d simply made up
(“Brazilian aardvark”), and it was left
there for six whole years.
During this time, the nickname found its way
onto hundreds of other websites, into several
newspapers (one of which was later cited by
the Wikipedia page as a source), and even
books from university presses.
Other articles become battlegrounds for opposing
ideological edits.
The page on George W. Bush, for instance,
has received almost 47,000 edits, 2,520 times
the average of 18.65.
Even so, studies have found Wikipedia to be
roughly as reliable as the Encyclopedia Britannica,
one of its most vocal detractors.
4.
Gmail
Google launched Gmail on April 1, 2004, and
because it was April Fools’ Day people assumed
it was a joke.
For one thing, it was only made available
(allegedly) to a handful of “email aficionados.”
For another, it pledged an unprecedented 1GB
of storage space—“up to eight billion
bits of information, … 500,000 pages of
email,” and 100 times more than Hotmail—to
every single user, free of charge, forever.
It all seemed too good to be true.
But it soon became clear how they paid for
it—by scanning personal emails for keywords
and selling targeted ad space.
As it gained traction, it sparked a privacy
debate that rages to this day.
For precisely this reason, TIME magazine called
the launch of Gmail “the beginning of the
modern era of the web.”
The service was also the “first major cloud-based
app that was capable of replacing conventional
PC software, not just complementing it.”
Nowadays, it has more than 1.2 billion users
and, according to Google, no longer scans
emails for data, having apparently gathered
enough.
But most users were happy to sacrifice their
privacy for convenience anyway.
Gmail is widely seen as the most user-friendly
service available, known for its clear and
dependable interface, massive storage space
(now up to 15GB), and a legendary spam filter
that catches 99.9% of all unwanted mail (although
it does misidentify up to 0.05% of emails
as spam).
3.
YouTube
YouTube has come a long, long way since its
very first video was uploaded.
Acquired by Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion,
it rolled out its ads the next year.
Today the majority of Americans—80% of 18-
to 49-year-olds and a massive 94% of 18- to
24-year-olds—regularly use the site.
In 2015, we spent 74% more time watching YouTube
than we did in the year before—although
it’s not clear where all that time came
from considering we only spent 4% less time
watching TV.
It’s not just Americans, either.
Available in 76 languages across more than
88 countries, YouTube now reaches 95% of internet
users worldwide.
Together they watch around a billion hours—114,155
years or so—of video every day.
But that’s just a fraction of the video
on there.
More than 400 hours of video are uploaded
to the site every minute—or 24 millennia’s
worth every year.
Understandably, YouTube has long been seen
as a threat to media moguls, who’ve thrown
all kinds of obstacles in its way—particularly
copyright lawsuits.
No biggie, though.
Having paid out $2 billion between 2007 and
2016, the site has developed an advanced automatic
scanning system to cross-reference all video
uploads against more than 600 years’ worth
of copyright-protected material.
2.
Twitter
As of 12:50 PM on March 21, 2006, the whole
of Twitter had just one solitary tweet online.
Three years later, it reached its first billion
and nowadays gets that many tweets in two
days, at an average of 6,000 tweets per second.
In 2010, Twitter gave the Library of Congress
an archive of every single tweet ever sent,
and continued to archive every tweet from
then on—right up until the end of 2017 when
privacy concerns forced them to stop.
These days, since January 1, 2018, they only
archive tweets they deem to be “of ongoing
national interest.”
And it’s probably just as well; the backlog
is huge and only getting huger by the second.
As Twitter has pointed out, 200 million tweets
alone is the equivalent of 8,163 copies of
Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which, stacked,
would reach 1,470 feet high and take roughly
31 years to read through.
And that’s just a morning’s tweets at
the current rate of expansion.
As for who’s writing them all, it appears
to be a minority of users—perhaps as few
as 335 million of the 1.3 billion people signed
up.
Journalists represent a quarter of all Twitter
accounts and evidently rely on the platform—hence
so many “news” stories today essentially
being off-Twitter retweets.
It’s not a terrible source, though, considering
most of the world’s leaders are on there.
The most popular, with 53.5 million followers,
is of course Donald Trump.
He tweets on average 13 times a day and, according
to expert Jaron Lanier, is clearly addicted
to the platform—“nervous, paranoid, cranky
… sort of itching for a fight … striking
out every morning, fishing for somebody to
harass or seeing who’s harassing him”—all
of which makes him worryingly easy to manipulate.
1.
Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg essentially copied HotOrNot.com
when he came up with the idea for “Facesmash,”
a platform for Harvard students to rate each
other’s appearances, or in his case compare
them to farm animals.
The only real difference was that people didn’t
upload their own photos; Zuckerberg simply
gathered and used their college ID pics without
first getting permission or even letting them
know.
He narrowly avoided expulsion for the scandal
and was forced to take the site down.
But its celebrated successor is anything but
squeaky clean, facing criticism not only over
privacy concerns, but for its influence and
addictiveness as well.
(It may be telling that he majored in psychology.)
Today, Facebook has around 2.23 billion monthly
users, of which more than half—1.47 billion—use
the site every day.
The majority of Americans (68%) are now on
there and 74% check it daily, with 51% of
18- to 24-year-olds believing it’s hard
to quit.
A worrying 63% rely on it for news, despite
270 million accounts making it up.
And that’s a lot of trolls—more than the
population of Indonesia, the fourth most populous
nation, and as many users as there are Russians
and Mexicans combined.
