Probably most of you reading this in 1993 weren’t even born. The Internet, and also the World Wide Web, and that huge global network of slowly evolving and evolving websites had done just that. creating winners and losers very quickly.

An animation posted on Reddit and created by a user named james eagle it does exactly a visual review of this evolution of the internet It highlights the most popular websites from 1993 to the present. A nice summary of empires that have come and gone… and of course other empires that remain today.

(Part of it) the history of the internet made bars that come and go

Names like AOL, Prodigy or Compuserve probably won’t even ring a bell for the younger generation, but they ruled the internet in 1993. In fact, AOL (America On Line) continued to do so. starting the era of internet directories. Not search engines, no, directories.

This is how Yahoo!, Lycos, Excite or MSN started a dizzying race for attention in the mid-90s. It was also the time of the legendary Geocities and the monstrous 1.0 websites that were getting richer in content and design.

Animation is a good way to see how Yahoo! works. For most of the 2000s, eBay became an absolute reference despite pressure from other giants like Google or Amazon. In 2005, the pressure of social networks started with MySpace While Wikipedia emerged timidly, and sites like Ask and the BBC were referencing, MSN was the third most-visited website in the world—thanks to the ubiquitous Windows.

Then, at the end of 2007 and the beginning of 2008, two magnificent phenomena would come and they would grow like bubbles: YouTube and Facebook. The local search engines of Russia and China (Yandex and Baidu) have won everything thanks to this particular battle with Google.

Things used to move very little from there. Twitter was supposed to go into effect at the end of 2012 and Instagram at the end of 2014, but as we said, The dominance of Google, YouTube and Facebook has only increased in recent years. It’s interesting to see that other social networking giants like TikTok or Twitch and platforms like Netflix haven’t yet made it into these unique ‘top 10’, but they and other platforms may do so in the future.