AOL and Yahoo are now virtually worthless parts of a phone company, with Verizon collecting their digital bones to absorb, sell or close what remains. But two decades ago, AOL and Yahoo actually represented the Internet, along with the Microsoft Web site (MSN).
A new video shows how this demise happened and how Google and YouTube dominated the Internet through an eight-minute graph of the most visited Web sites in almost 24 years, based on monthly traffic from January 1996.
The video, posted on a YouTube channel called Data is Beautiful, is a set of time-lapse statistical videos that cost the burden of a "doctoral student obsessed with picture data," as he describes himself on his channel.
As the video shows, AOL remained the undisputed superpower until early 2001 with nearly twice as much traffic as its closest rival, Yahoo and MSN, and under it are sites that are truly archaeological, such as Geo Cities, Exit and Lycos.
By 2001, Yahoo had begun to outperform AOL with monthly visits, and the latter began to fall sharply. Yahoo became the Roman Empire of the Internet, dominating its Web portal, e-mail, and user groups for half a decade, until Google broke into the portals and became more Sites visited since mid 2006.
However, Google's hegemony was not inevitable, as she and Yahoo were constantly rotating those with the title of highest traffic until July 2010 to begin the era of actual Google's hegemony.
The modern era of the Internet began to emerge in 2007 when YouTube and Facebook appeared to be out of nowhere. YouTube was founded just three years earlier, but got a big boost in 2006 when Google bought it for what appeared to be a huge $ 1.65 billion. Facebook started in 2004 as a limited network of universities, and when it opened its doors to the general public in 2006, it quickly began to dominate the Internet, while a site like MySpace drowned into oblivion.
The trio of Google-YouTube-Facebook has been in control since 2012, and although these sites remained in the lead in 2019, their relative strength has changed. Facebook's online share has been falling since mid-2014 as Google moved forward. Its absolute numbers have dropped from around 28 billion monthly visits in late 2017 to more than 23 billion in October. Google's traffic is three times higher than Facebook, and about 4.5 times that of YouTube.
But as the video data show shows, no technical platform has dominated the entire history of the Internet, so there is no guarantee that these dominant sites will remain at the forefront.