Introduction

Websites as digital platforms, has revolutionized our ways of communication, living, and information consumption. It also contributed to the growth of globalization. In this project, we took an interest in the world’s most popular website and it’s historical growth. Our goal is to create a visual representation of the rise and fall of these popular websites.

About the graph

In the graph above, we collected the historical data of 46 websites, between the year 2009 and 2019. Each curve represents the change of the website’s ranking in the past 10 years. The rectangle in the graph represents a set of data for the website at that specific time. The height of the rectangle represents the monthly average of User Online Sessions. The width of the rectangle represents Daily page view per user. The stroke weight represents page view per user. In other words, the higher the average monthly visits, the taller the height of the rectangle is. The wider the rectangle, the more page view it has. At the side of the graph, it included the website’s domain name, and country of origin. The websites are also categorized into different types, then each indicated in a different colour.

Questions to keep in mind when reading the graph

Which is the most popular website?

Which website has the most constant growth?

which website has the most drastic changes in growth?

This image is zoomed in at the top of the graph. It features the websites that held a steady place at the top of the ranking chart. They did not have any major changes over the years.

At the lower part of the chart, many of the less popular websites are struggling to stay on at their position. Websites such as Blogspot, Pornhub, Amazon.co.jp fell out of the chart at one point, but was able to bounce back after.

One interesting aspect we noticed is that just because some websites has a lot of visitors doesn’t mean it will have a lot page views. This phenomena is very obvious on sites such as wikipedia (an encyclopedia website), and vk.com (social media website).

The legend is located at the bottom right side of the graph, it provided a brief overview on how to read it graph. It explains the meaning of the width and the height of the rectangle places on the graph.

Video Website

We show different categories of website rankings.Video, social networking websites are on the rise.

Search Engine & Software and technology website

It has shown a downward trend in the past two years.

About Data

Alexa ranks websites based on a combined measure of page view and Sessions, and creates a list of most popular websites based on this ranking time-averaged over three-month periods. Only the site’s highest-level domain is recorded, aggregating any subdomains.

Source

Internet Archive
Alexa
Traffic and Alexa Rank History

Download

Internet Archive
Alexa
Traffic and Alexa Rank History

Project by

Di Wu
Zhengxin Chen
Xuan Zhang
Mengxue Jin
Xushan Li
Shaomin Niu

Faculty

Michele Mauri
Angeles Briones
Gabriele Colombo
Simone Vantini
Salvatore Zingale

Teaching Assiatants

Andrea Benedetti
Lea Mara Fabiano
Alessandra Facchin
Beatrice Gobbo
Tommaso Elli
Jacopo di lorio
Anna Riboldi