[ih] Visualization of Internet History 1993-now

[Mark Goodge]

On 23/01/2021 21:58, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote:
> Er, hum, excuse me, for January 1993 it shows AOL as having 20
> million of something. http://info.cern.ch was almost certainly still
> the leading site then, and there were only about 50 sites in total,
> mainly in academia. AOL was widely sneered at for *not* being an ISP.
> Anyway, aol.com wasn't registered until 1995-06-22.

The early years of this are clearly including visits to walled garden 
dial-up services, which is why AOL is way out there to begin with. It 
would probably be more helpful if it didn't. But then, the web and the 
Internet aren't necessarily synonymous.
> The graphic also shows imdb having 21,261 of something in January
> 1993. imdb.com was registered on 1996-01-05. mtv.com was registered
> on 1995-02-14. bloomberg.com on 1993-09-29.

IMDb long existed before the domain name was registered. It was on 
Usenet before it was on the web, and when it first appeared on the web 
it was hosted by the CompSci department at Cardiff University (where the 
website's creator was doing a PhD).

https://web.archive.org/web/20130324121844/http://www.cs.cf.ac.uk/movies/

I haven't checked, but it wouldn't surprise me if MTV and Bloomberg's 
websites were originally on a different domain to the ones they use now, 
either (just like Facebook was originally on thefacebook.com). A lot of 
well-established sites changed their domains over the course of their 
early history.

Incidentally, I wrote my first website in 1994, when, according to that 
video, Apple (in 10th place) was getting 296,677 visits a month and the 
BBC (12th) was getting 112,930. I now run a website which routinely gets 
more than a million visitors a month, but, according to the Alexa 
rankings, it isn't even in the top 100,000 most popular sites. That fact 
alone is an illustration of how much the web has grown.

Mark