Most Popular Websites in the World
Since its inception in 1991, the World Wide Web has truly exploded in popularity. There are now currently over 1.7 billion websites in existence. The internet would not be the same without the WWW. There are many different sites for many different topics and services that are attracting millions of visits everyday and every week. But then there are the exceptionally popular sites that are getting billions, yes billions, of visitors every day and every week. The following shows the current Top 10 of most popular websites the world wide web has to offer.
The ranking is based on the approximate number of unique visits a website gathers per month.
The 10 Most Popular Websites in the World 2020
1. Google.com
79 billion visits per month
Type of Website: Search Engine
Online since: 1997
Owned by: Alphabet, Inc.
Google.com is the, by far, most visited website in the world. The search engine attracted around 79 billion visits per month on average last year. Google is the world’s largest and most used search engine, so this shouldn’t be surprising. The search engine is online since 1997 and has indexed more than 150 trillion (yes, trillion) web pages to date. Google.com is owned and operated by Alphabet, the parent company of Google, which was founded by the inventors of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
2. Youtube.com
30 billion visits per month
Type of Website: Video Hosting
Online since: 2005
Owned by: Alphabet, Inc.
Youtube.com is the second most visited website in the world 2020. The world’s by far most popular video hosting site gathered around 30 billion visits per average month last year. YouTube is hosting more than 5 billion videos to date with around 500 hours worth of video being uploaded to the website everyday on average. YouTube is online since 2005 and owned by Google / Alphabet since 2006. Alphabet therefore owns both of the two most popular websites in the world 2020.
3. Facebook.com
23 billion visits per month
Type of Website: Social Media
Online since: 2004
Owned by: Facebook, Inc.
As the world’s most popular social media platform, Facebook finds itself at no. 3 in the ranking of the Top 10 most popular websites in the world. Facebook attracted an average of around 23 billion visits per month last year. The website has been online since 2004. It is owned and operated by the Facebook, Inc., the corporation behind the platform, founded by Mark Zuckerberg.
4. Baidu.com
7 billion visits per month
Type of Website: Search Engine
Online since: 2000
Owned by: Baidu, Inc.
Baidu.com is the world’s fourth most popular website in 2020. Baidu can be described as the “Chinese Google”. It generated an average of around 7 billion visits per month last year. The search engine website is online since 2000. Although the founder of Baidu, Robin Li, already invented the concept of a link-analyzing search engine as early as 1996 and therefore even before Google went online. In fact, Google’s search engine is partly based on Li’s concept. Li gave the internet his own version in 2000 and Baidu has dominated the Chinese search engine market ever since.
5. Wikipedia.org
4.8 billion visits per month
Type of Website: Encyclopedia
Online since: 2001
Owned by: Wikimedia Foundation
Wikipedia concludes the Top 5 of the most popular websites in the world 2020. The free online encyclopedia was able to attract around 4.8 billion visits worldwide per month on average. Wikipedia is also the only website in the Top 10 ranking of the most popular websites in the world 2020 that is owned by a non-profit organization, the San Francisco-based Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia has been online since 2001 and ever since truly changed the way the world searches and finds information about various topics.
6. Yahoo.com
3.8 billion visits per month
Type of Website: Search Engine & News Aggregator
Online since: 1995
Owned by: Verizon Communications, Inc.
Yahoo! is an American web services provider headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, and owned by Verizon Media. The original Yahoo! company was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994 and was incorporated on March 2, 1995. Yahoo was one of the pioneers of the early Internet era in the 1990s.
It provides or provided a Web portal, search engine Yahoo! Search, and related services, including Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping, video sharing, fantasy sports, and its social media website. At its height it was one of the most popular sites in the United States. According to third-party web analytics providers Alexa and SimilarWeb, Yahoo was the most widely read news and media website – with over 7 billion views per month – ranking as the sixth-most-visited website globally in 2016.
Once one of the largest Internet companies, Yahoo slowly declined starting in the late 2000s, and in 2017 Verizon Communications acquired most of Yahoo’s Internet business for $4.48 billion, excluding its stakes in Alibaba Group and Yahoo! Japan, which were transferred to Yahoo’s successor company Altaba. Despite its decline from prominence, Yahoo domain websites are still among the most popular, ranking 10th in the world according to the Alexa rankings as of October 2019.
7. Twitter.com
3.3 billion visits per month
Type of Website: Social Media
Online since: 2006
Owned by: Twitter, Inc.
Twitter is an American microblogging and social networking service on which users post and interact with messages known as “tweets”. Registered users can post, like and retweet tweets, but unregistered users can only read them. Users access Twitter through its website interface, through Short Message Service (SMS) or its mobile-device application software. Twitter, Inc. is based in San Francisco, California, and has more than 25 offices around the world. Tweets were originally restricted to 140 characters, but was doubled to 280 for non-CJK languages in November 2017. Audio and video tweets remain limited to 140 seconds for most accounts.
Twitter was created by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 and launched in July of that year. By 2012, more than 100 million users posted 340 million tweets a day, and the service handled an average of 1.6 billion search queries per day. In 2013, it was one of the ten most-visited websites and has been described as “the SMS of the Internet”. As of 2018, Twitter had more than 321 million monthly active users.
8. Instagram.com
2.8 billion visits per month
Type of Website: Social Media
Online since: 2010
Owned by: Facebook, Inc.
Instagram (commonly abbreviated to IG or Insta) is an American photo and video sharing social networking service owned by Facebook, created by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger and originally launched on iOS in October 2010. The Android version was released in April 2012, followed by a feature-limited desktop interface in November 2012, a Fire OS app in June 2014, and an app for Windows 10 in October 2016. The app allows users to upload media that can be edited with filters and organized by hashtags and geographical tagging. Posts can be shared publicly or with pre-approved followers. Users can browse other users content by tags and locations and view trending content. Users can like photos and follow other users to add their content to a feed, a function that seems to be discontinued as of September 2020.
9. Amazon.com
2.7 billion visits per month
Type of Website: E-Commerce
Online since: 1995
Owned by: Amazon, Inc.
Amazon.com, Inc. is an American multinational technology company based in Seattle, Washington, which focuses on e-commerce, cloud computing, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. It is considered one of the Big Five companies in the U.S. information technology industry, along with Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook. The company has been referred to as “one of the most influential economic and cultural forces in the world, as well as the world’s most valuable brand.
Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos in Bellevue, Washington, on July 5, 1994. The company started as an online marketplace for books but expanded to sell electronics, software, video games, apparel, furniture, food, toys, and jewelry. In 2015, Amazon surpassed Walmart as the most valuable retailer in the United States by market capitalization.[14] In 2017, Amazon acquired Whole Foods Market for US$13.4 billion, which substantially increased its footprint as a physical retailer. In 2018, Bezos announced that its two-day delivery service, Amazon Prime, had surpassed 100 million subscribers worldwide.
10. Yandex.ru
2.6 billion visits per month
Type of Website: Search Engine & News Aggregator
Online since: 1997
Owned by: Yandex N.V.
Yandex N.V. is a Russian multinational corporation providing Internet-related products and services, including transportation, search and information services, eCommerce, navigation, mobile applications, and online advertising. They provide over 70 services.
The firm is incorporated in the Netherlands, but the company founders and most of the team members are located in Russia. It primarily serves audiences in Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States, and also has 18 commercial offices worldwide.The firm is the largest technology company in Russia and the largest search engine on the Internet in Russian, with a market share of over 52%. The Yandex.ru home page is the 4th most popular website in Russia. It also has the largest market share of any search engine in Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States and is the 5th largest search engine worldwide after Google, Baidu, Bing, and Yahoo!.
