5 Most Popular Websites in the World

Contents

Google
YouTube
Facebook
Baidu
Yahoo

The most popular websites in the world should be familiar to most people who use the internet regularly. Anyone who is pursuing an information technology degree will probably understand how much work goes into making a website successful. Getting just one page of a website in the top 10 results of a Google search can take years, especially in a category with strong competition. The websites at the top of this list all receive tens of billions of visitors every month, and they have enough influence to make it very hard for competitors to gain a share of the market.

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1. Google

The most popular website on Earth is Google, a search engine based in the United States. It receives 42.46 billion visitors every month. Visitors view an average of nine Web pages per visit. Google’s bounce rate is 31.44 percent, which is perhaps surprisingly low as most users never browse beyond the first page of search results. A domain’s bounce rate is the percentage of users who navigate away from the domain after viewing just one page. A large portion of Google’s page views come from users:

looking up directions on Google Maps
searching for pictures on Google Images
browsing the headlines on Google News
streaming content on Google Videos.

2. YouTube

YouTube is the largest video streaming service in the world, with 23.35 billion visitors navigating to the site every month to watch:

news
commentary
entertainment
how-to videos

YouTube content can be embedded in blogs and social media pages. Views of embedded videos are counted in the total number of monthly views on YouTube. According to Techwiser, YouTube content creators can earn seven-figure incomes from advertiser support on their videos. Many YouTube channels also earn money by promoting products directly within their videos. Many collect donations from channel subscribers.

3. Facebook

With 22.3 billion visitors each month, Facebook has the third highest amount of traffic of any website on the planet. It’s the world’s largest social network, with 2.23 billion active users logging into their accounts every month. Facebook offers a useful platform for businesses and working professionals to engage with the public and promote their products and services. From artists and entrepreneurs to information technology graduates, professionals of every industry can use Facebook to connect with other people in their field.

4. Baidu

Baidu is China’s largest social network, and its 10.45 billion monthly visitors make it the fourth largest website in the world. The Chinese government places restrictions on the content that citizens can access within China’s borders. So Baidu acts effectively as China’s main search engine and social media platform.

5. Yahoo

The fifth most popular website in the world is the Yahoo search engine, which draws 4.59 billion monthly visitors. Most users search Yahoo for news stories. The Yahoo smartphone app generates a large portion of Yahoo’s overall traffic. Yahoo was once the Internet’s largest search engine, but it ceded that title to Google in the early 2000s. Anyone who is pursuing an information technology degree can learn a lot about the IT industry by searching for content on websites such as:

Google
Yahoo
YouTube

The list of most popular websites is always changing, and today’s most popular companies may not be as popular 10 years from now.