Culture
The 41 Most Influential Websites Of All Time
websites introBarely 20 years old, the internet as we know it is young – and yet it’s become such a powerful presence in our lives that some have called it “the 8th continent”, a realm of information exchange where the rules of survival are constantly evolving. These are the websites that have reigned supreme – if only, in some cases, for a little while.
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The 41 Most Influential Websites Of All Time.
infoInfo.cern.ch: In December 2015, the world celebrated the 25th anniversary since the first website went live: info.cern.ch. Its creator, Tim Berners-Lee, is rightly celebrated as the father of the World Wide Web, even if it hasn’t turned out to be as ‘open’ and ‘accessible’ as he had once hoped. info.cern.ch
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The 41 Most Influential Websites Of All Time.
googleGoogle: That ‘Google it!’ is a familiar cry for billions wanting to find information on just about anything is testament to the incomparable impact of this website. Easily the world’s most popular search engine, it’s probably also got information on you – just Google yourself. google.com
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The 41 Most Influential Websites Of All Time.
facebookFacebook: Facebook wasn’t the first to come up with the idea of linking up with friends, but no social networking site has been able to match its sustained popularity. Started by Mark Zuckerberg and Harvard friends in 2004, by December 2015 it had 1.59 billion active monthly users. facebook.com
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The 41 Most Influential Websites Of All Time.
eBayeBay: Founded in 1995, eBay is a multibillion-dollar shopping and auction site that has transformed retail. It makes money from hosting and selling just about anything – guns, body parts, live animals and a few other things excepted. ebay.com
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YouTube:YouTube: Andy Warhol’s ‘famous for 15 minutes’ was uttered for a different age, but it could hardly be more appropriate for the digital age. Everyone, from corporations to established stars, has a YouTube page, and while most videos are forgettable, the site opens the possibility to millions for fame … or notoriety. youtube.com
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The 41 Most Influential Websites Of All Time.
Amazon:Amazon: Amazon is one of the most loved and criticised of companies to emerge from the tech revolution. It’s been accused of everything from contributing to bookshop closures to not paying its fair share of taxes. What cannot be doubted is that it has millions of customers, and where they once bought paperbacks, they now also buy everything from Kindles to drones. amazon.com
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The 41 Most Influential Websites Of All Time.
Twitter:Twitter: For some people, it’s difficult to imagine a time without Twitter; it was, in fact, just 10 years ago that the first tweet was sent. Nowadays, as well as its billions of users, it is often the outlet for breaking some of the world’s most important news – in fewer than 140 characters, of course. twitter.com
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The 41 Most Influential Websites Of All Time.
Apple:Apple: Ostensibly still the world’s most valuable company (ahead of Google-owned Alphabet), Apple products have played a major role in the so-called internet revolution. Its website is one of the most visited of all tech sites, and it’s used for buying Apple products, getting advice and booking store appointments. apple.com [Rendering courtesy of Kevin Fox of kfury.com]
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The 41 Most Influential Websites Of All Time.
Microsoft:Microsoft: For so long a big rival, the Microsoft website is actually a little ahead of Apple in the most popular website ranking: according to experts at Alexa, Microsoft is 40th and Apple 50th. This tech giant does everything from the ubiquitous Office to gobbling up smaller companies. msn.com
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The 41 Most Influential Websites Of All Time.
LinkedIn:LinkedIn: It’s not that you won’t get a job if you’re not profiled on LinkedIn, but there is always the fear that if you’re not, it’s … well … perhaps an omission to rival forgetting the second page of your CV. It has around 400 million members. linkedin.com
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The 41 Most Influential Websites Of All Time.
Yahoo!:Yahoo!: Yahoo! is another survivor of the turbulent first decades of the internet. Its value skyrocketed during the dot-com bubble, fell off a cliff, recovered somewhat and is now one of the world’s biggest internet portals, noted for its email and search engine. yahoo.com
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The 41 Most Influential Websites Of All Time.
The New York Times:The New York Times: The New York Times is the most visited newspaper website in the world. Reflecting the quandary of making money in the digital age, however, the NYT opted to erect a paywall. It has 1.1 million digital subscribers and “65.8 million unique visitors each month”. nytimes.com
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The 41 Most Influential Websites Of All Time.
Salon:Salon: Even for experts, it’s difficult to confidently predict the future of traditional printed news outlets. David Talbot and other San Francisco Examiner journalists set up Salon as a web-only magazine in 1995, mixing long, considered pieces with punchier, tabloid-like articles that continue to attract clicks. Mirroring the challenges facing traditional print, Salon continually struggles to make a profit. salon.com
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The 41 Most Influential Websites Of All Time.
TripAdvisor:TripAdvisor: TripAdvisor has in one sense transformed the business of booking holidays. It’s a classic social media-esque comment site that has become so popular that it’s near unthinkable for some people to book a trip without first consulting it. tripadvisor.com
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The 41 Most Influential Websites Of All Time.
Pirate Bay:Pirate Bay: Discussions about internet freedom show no sign of diminishing, with Pirate Bay often cited by various sides to defend their positions. This Sweden-based torrent site, which enables users to download just about every film (and more) for free, gets closed down frequently only for clones to open. thepiratebay.se
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The 41 Most Influential Websites Of All Time.
The Drudge ReportThe Drudge Report: The success of Matt Drudge’s Drudge Report website was an indicator of the direction of travel of news reporting and commentary. Started in 1995, Drudge started to get political exclusives from 1996, and was part in turning the heat on traditional news outlets. drudgereport.com
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The 41 Most Influential Websites Of All Time.
The Huffington Post:The Huffington Post: Now established in numerous countries, The Huffington Post is one of the most visited news websites on the net. Launched in 2005 by Arianna Huffington, the free, digital-only news site was partly inspired to compete with the more right-wing Drudge Report. Controversially, it uses unpaid bloggers as well as celebrities to complement journalists. huffingtonpost.com
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The 41 Most Influential Websites Of All Time.
BuzzFeed:BuzzFeed: How much can a news website be worth? With upbeat, sometimes breaking stories, Buzzfeed claims ‘“6 billion monthly global content views”, with more than half video, and over 200 million unique visitors each month. Recent estimates value it at between around USD 850 million and USD 1 billion. buzzfeed.com
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The 41 Most Influential Websites Of All Time.
PayPal:PayPal: PayPal is one of the new kinds of electronic payment systems that has so disrupted and worried traditional banking. It’s basically an online money transfer portal, used by millions of companies and individuals for everything from business transactions to auction payments (including from its parent company, eBay). paypal.com
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The 41 Most Influential Websites Of All Time.
Craigslist:Craigslist: It seems quaint nowadays to think that local newspapers were the primary source of classified ads. Craigslist, founded in the mid-1990s, does something similar but claims “more than 60 billion page views per month”. craigslist.com
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The 41 Most Influential Websites Of All Time.
WikiLeaks:WikiLeaks: Few websites have had the stunning impact that WikiLeaks had from around 2010 onwards. While WikiLeaks eventually became associated with the personality of Julian Assange, the group’s release (in cooperation with various media outlets) of documents that governments would rather keep secret changed the socio-political landscape forever. wikileaks.org
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The 41 Most Influential Websites Of All Time.
Hotmail:Hotmail: Hotmail was one of the trailblazing web-based email services. Launched in 1996 with what is now considered a tiny storage capacity, it became popular because it could be accessed anywhere and not tied to an ISP. In 1997, Microsoft paid hundreds of millions for it – nowadays it is largely superseded by Outlook.com. hotmail.com
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The 41 Most Influential Websites Of All Time.
Blogger:Blogger: The internet has created countless new words, with the verb ‘to blog’ now as familiar as ‘to Google’, for example. Blogging, particularly political blogging, became popular from the late 1990s, with blogger.com so popular after its 1999 launch that Google bought it a few years later. blogger.com
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The 41 Most Influential Websites Of All Time.
Match.com:Match.com: Match.com has its origins in the days just before the internet really took off, in 1993. By the mid-2000s it was the biggest online dating service in the world. It is used by millions across the world and has helped online dating become a pretty run-of-the-mill method of finding a partner. match.com
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The 41 Most Influential Websites Of All Time.
Digg:Digg: Digg became big news in the mid 2000s by getting users to recommend stories to the Digg community. It attracted hundreds of millions of users before experiencing difficulties after a relaunch. It survived and modernised, and is one of the most popular online news aggregators around. digg.com
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The 41 Most Influential Websites Of All Time.
reddit:reddit: One of the reasons Digg famously stuttered might have been down to self-made problems, though the emergence of the likes of FaceBook, then Twitter, can’t have helped. In addition was reddit, a news aggregator that appears to give users more influence – it claims 230 million unique visitors a month. reddit.com
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The 41 Most Influential Websites Of All Time.
Instagram:Instagram: If there’s a YouTube, a Twitter and a Facebook, it only makes sense that there is also a picture-sharing companion. Instagram is a result of increasingly high-quality cameras in smartphones, which means billions across the globe can share their latest/funniest/saddest picture/video in an instant. instagram.com
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The 41 Most Influential Websites Of All Time.
Pinterest:Pinterest: Similar to Instagram, Pinterest is also an image-sharing social platform, though it focuses more on finding interesting pictures to pin to a user’s board. While Instagram (around 400 million active users a month) is more concerned with sharing personal pictures, Pinterest (around 100 million monthly active users) focuses more on images found through searches. pinterest.com
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The 41 Most Influential Websites Of All Time.
Netflix:Netflix: Netflix is now as much a part of the TV/movie landscape as more traditional outlets (BBC in the UK or NBC in the US). Netflix streams (and rents discs of) TV series and films to around 75 million subscribers in 190 countries. Watching habits are changing, in particular with regard to TV series, now that several episodes can be consumed in a ‘binge’ sitting on computers or tablets – including original Netflix content such as House of Cards. netflix.com
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The 41 Most Influential Websites Of All Time.
Baidu:Baidu: Censored and observed it might be, but the internet is playing an increasing role in developments in China. The Baidu.com search engine is the fourth most visited website in the world (according to Alexa), behind Google, YouTube and Facebook. baidu.com
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The 41 Most Influential Websites Of All Time.
Napster:Napster: Did Napster revolutionise the music industry? It certainly played a role, to such a degree that 16 years after Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker joined forces to create it, the effects are still reverberating. Powerful players in the music industry were utterly petrified by the sheer ease of sharing music online. napster.com
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The 41 Most Influential Websites Of All Time.
MP3.com:MP3.com: Even before the existence of Napster, there were various earlier versions of file-sharing sites. MP3.com ran into difficulties when it allowed users to access stored but already paid-for music online. The furore about copyright continues today. mp3.com
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The 41 Most Influential Websites Of All Time.
SoundCloud:SoundCloud: The challenge provided by the likes of Napster inspired music payment models. Based in Berlin, many artists have done deals to allow SoundCloud to stream their music, now for meagre returns or cumulative worthwhile payments – depending on your perspective – from ads. soundcloud.com
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The 41 Most Influential Websites Of All Time.
Classmates:Classmates: It was the thing of dreams, or nightmares, depending on your point of view. Via Classmates, old school or university colleagues and friends could get back in touch. And millions did, with numerous countries producing similar sites inspired by the US version. classmates.com
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The 41 Most Influential Websites Of All Time.
Friends Reunited:Friends Reunited: The UK equivalent of Classmates highlights the precarious nature of soaring websites: all the rage for some years, they can quickly disappear almost without a trace. Around 15 million people had registered with Friends Reunited by the mid-2000s. Sold to a TV company in 2005, by 2016 it had closed. friendsreunited.com
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The 41 Most Influential Websites Of All Time.
Tor:Tor: “The Tor network is a group of volunteer-operated servers that allows people to improve their privacy and security on the internet”, according to its website. It is, perhaps, the most famous method of using the internet anonymously. Internet freedom aficionados love it; governments around the world are less enamoured with it. torproject.org
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The 41 Most Influential Websites Of All Time.
Project Gutenberg:Project Gutenberg: Project Gutenberg is seen as one of the most worthy sides in the rise of the internet. Initially created in the 1970s, it now takes advantage of technology (albeit in a very simple way) that allows books to be digitalised. All eBooks are free and adhere to US copyright laws. gutenberg.org
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The 41 Most Influential Websites Of All Time.
The Guardian:The Guardian: As well as being the most popular liberal-oriented newspaper in the world after the NYT, the Guardian is important because of its strident stance on not erecting a paywall. It might be losing tens of millions every year, but its free-to-read policy is attuned with many notions of an open internet – Tim Berners-Lee would likely approve. theguardian.co.uk
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The 41 Most Influential Websites Of All Time.
AOL:AOL: To some degree, AOL defined many people’s early internet experience. It was through AOL that millions connected to the World Wide Web, initially in the US. Owned by Verizon, it is still a major presence, with email, news sites, and ownership of The Huffington Post and Techcrunch. aol.com
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The 41 Most Influential Websites Of All Time.
The Web Foundation:The Web Foundation: As the man who set it all off, it is apt that Tim Berners-Lee continues to be a leading personality in the internet’s development. He started The Web Foundation in 2009 “to advance the open web as a public good and a basic right”. With so many people and corporations focusing on monetising it, his aim is to expand access, make it more democratic and to “make knowledge and data freely accessible to all online”. webfoundation.org
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The 41 Most Influential Websites Of All Time.
GeoCities:GeoCities: GeoCities was something akin to a proto social media site that today’s tech-savvy youngsters will consider ancient history. Started in 1994, users created content in a range of categories, and by the late 1990s it was one of the most visited websites around. Yahoo! paid a reported USD 3-4 billion for it, but closed it in 2009. archiveteam.org
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