What the Top 10 Websites Tell Us About the Internet

The internet is inherently social.

Recently I saw a tweet listing the top 10 most trafficked websites in the world. Unfortunately, when I went back to reference that tweet in order to write this newsletter, the tweet had been deleted. But I managed to find an article listing the the 10 most trafficked websites in the world.

So here they are, the top 10 most trafficked websites in the world:

In this list we have the following:

• 4 social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and WhatsApp)

• 4 search engines (Google, YouTube Baidu, and Yandex)

• 1 crowd-sourced encyclopedia (Wikipedia)

• 1 media site/former search engine (Yahoo)

One note: I think you could place YouTube in either the search engine category or the social media category here, as it sort of functions in both ways, but I put it in search engines as I would bet that’s the primary way people use it.

My Surprising Surprise

When I first saw the list of the top 10 websites, I was surprised for a second, and then I wasn’t. 

I wasn’t surprised by the dominance of search engines or the presence of Wikipedia on this list. I was definitely shocked by Yahoo! being in the eight spot here, but that’s not what I’m writing about today. 

What did surprise me when I first saw this list was just how dominant social media platforms are on the internet. I’m sort of ashamed at how surprised I was by that. If anyone should not be surprised by the dominance of social media on today’s internet, it should be me, right? It’s basically what I write about every week in this newsletter and in the two books I’ve published in the last two years. 

But I was surprised by social’s dominance on this list. Why was I surprised? I think I was surprised because part of me still lives in 2013 when all of these social media platforms certainly existed but weren’t as dominant as they are today. It makes me think of the well-meaning friend who asked me in 2013 if I should be going into a social media job because it seemed like a fad that wouldn’t be around for very long.

Social media sort of dominates this chart, at least as much as search engines do. We should grasp the gravity of that.

What Does This List Tell Us?

It isn’t profound or anything, but I think that this list tells us that people like to use the internet to connect to other people more than they like to do anything else.

The internet is social media, in one sense. 

Even search engines are sort of social media, right? We input our queries into a text box and a website serves up countless answers to our queries…answers that are made (mostly) by other people and posted to websites on the internet.

Wikipedia is sort of social media right? Wikipedia isn’t some encyclopedia of knowledge that we discovered in a cave someplace and put on the internet. Wikipedia is a constantly-updated, ever-evolving encyclopedia of human knowledge created and edited by other people. 

The internet is truly, at its core, all social media.

There is no Amazon on this top 10 list. There is no Netflix or other streaming service on this top 10 list. eBay is not on this list. 

The websites that dominate the internet are the ones that seem to give us the clearest connection to other people. 

We long engage with other people made in the image of God. It’s in our bones, in our souls. And even if the internet offers some version of connecting with other image-bearers that is less-than-ideal, it offers us the opportunity nonetheless. And we’re obsessed with it.