THE WEBSITES OF THE WORLD

Visiting a website nowadays is equivalent to breathing for air. One does it, but doesn’t give it much thought.

Alter all, high tech as this domestic society knows of is part of modern life. The “Gen Z” demographic that ranges from those born from 1996 onward is the first “real” generation that can’t recall life where cell phones didn’t exist and having access to an electronic device that connects to the internet was always a given. The same way that other generations have access to whatever modern connivence thrived.

As a person over the age of sixty, this writer doesn’t remember life before television access. As a kid, I was surprised that TV was once “not around”. I can recall asking those much older than me (any adult over the age of twenty-five, give or take a year) what life was like before one could turn on the TV to watch whatever was available. When I learned from these “grown-ups” that for amusement, they listened to the radio. I thought they only had a “top-40” station to tune in on as that was my choice for audio sounds coming in from my Ross eight transistor AM radio device. But they had radio shows just like what was on TV, except there were no pictures to look at. And they had the same stars to listen to as I saw on TV such as Bob Hope, Jack Benny, even Dinah Shore singing her hits such as “Button and Bows”. (I recall Dinah singing this song on her daytime TV talk Show Dinah’s Place that aired on NBC.) But over all, life was rather different back in the day.

But in today’s landscape, the web is all over and available at all hours of the day at just about anyplace where net access is at your fingertips. And with net access, there’s the websites to make it all worth its while.

Similarweb.com, a website that tracks media (and one of the 2 billion and counting) websites existing in cyberspace land, surveyed the top fifty visited websites that are there within the world wide web world. And the count isn’t much of a surprise to know who visited who and when.

As one can guess, Google ranks in on the top as number one. Even the term “google” serves as both a noun and a verb. (“Just Google It!”) It counts for 85.1 billion visits per month and is based in the good ol’ USA (Thirty of the top fifty sites are based in the USA, and half of these thirty of operated by big tech companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Netflix.)

Number two is YouTube, (33.0 billion visits per month) also operated by Google aka Alphabet. And others state that this site is one of the most helpful places to be on the ‘net, as well as the biggest time wasters to spend (too) much time in cyberspace. Of course, one can find almost anything and everything via YouTube. (Its exceptions range from content that may pose a threat to a group of society, and stuff that’s porn!) This writer can’t speak for the former listed content as that tends to come and go as fast as some source and upload it or delete it from a service. But for the latter (porn), those sites are in the top fifty, such as XVideos.com (#11), PornHub.com (#13), Xnxx.com (#14) XHamster.com (#26) and StripChat.com (#49).

Number three on the list is Facebook (“Meta”), (17.8B) the be-all-to-end-all for social media posts. Facebook has changed its style and demographic over its years. At one time, it was populated by a younger crowd. now much of its base is older Millennials (born 1980-1995) that first embraced this site as young kids, Gen-Xers (born 1965-79) that were young(er) adults to use for content, and the Baby Boomers (born 1946-64) that used this site to keep their kids in check, as well as to use to look for other people lost-lost to rekindle a friendship that may have fallen over through the years.

Ranking in at number four is Twitter (6.8B), where one can post a short(er) comment of whatever is worth a comment. Within the previous year, Twitter has seen its share of slack recently. (“Google it for more details!) But those that didn’t bail out are still tweeting to their little heart’s content.

In fifth place is Instagram (6.1B), a place to post photos that is worth posting. Instagram is operated by Meta, the parent company that also runs Facebook, so the two sites have their connection with each other. It’s another site that has its own verb, to “insta” another post.

In sixth place is Baidu.com (5.0B), a search engine site based in China. Unless one can read and write in a Chinese dialect, it doesn’t get much traffic from the USA. However, China is the second leading place in the world for top websites outside of the USA. (Russia has five top fifty websites as China has four).

Number seven is Wikipedia.org (4.8), known as an online encyclopedia, created and edited by volunteers around the world. This means that just about any subject can be found through this site, yet one has to do some fact checking to see if the information placed is true and accurate.

Eight place is Yandex.ru (3.4B), a search engine site based in Russia, and another site that isn’t in english. Unless one can read and write in this Russian based language, most of its traffic comes from areas that write and speak this form of communication.

In ninth place is Yahoo.com (3.3B), one of the earliest sites that ever grace the cyberspace universe of noteworthy interest. It also had a unique sound effect, a voice of a male “hillbilly” yelling “yah-hooo”! Its logo once consisted of comical looking fonts, adding to the humor it once brought. But that was back in the 1990s when the web itself was just as fun as it was mysterious.

And rounding out the top ten is Whatsapp.com (2.9B), another outlet for social media.

It was noted before that the USA leads in American based websites with thirty, followed by Russia with six, China with four, Japan with three, and South Korea with two. Asia is also the place where one can find the fastest internet worldwide, with Singapore and South Korea leading the pack.

For more details on the top fifty websites (along with infographics to make it all easier to understand), vist https://www.visualcapitalist.com/top-50-most-visited-websites/

This is proof that the ‘net as it’s known isn’t going away. It’s going to be here forever. When I was a kid, I thought that TV may go away as it once did long before I saw the first light of day. I was worried that one day, TV would totally disappear. All of my favorite (and not so favorite) programs would be gone forever! Of course, that didn’t mealitize. However, TV, as well as the web, has changed over the years. It changed for its better, and changed for its worse, depending on who you ask. And one day, another form of media will arrive to change how humans live on this earth. It may be in the form of artificial intelligence where the robots will finally take over. That may occur before one realizes. And in case you aren’t too sure on that notion, you can always google it for the results.

See? We warned you that the name of the number one search engine found in the universe is also a verb!! But you already know that! Right…?

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