This post may contain affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.
Since its inception in 1989, the internet has been in a phase of endless flux as millions of various sites emerged and then fell by the wayside. Many monstrous corporate players have arisen from this first chaos over the decades and have since become dominant in their niches. This trend has been notably visible in the last decade. As Google, Youtube, Amazon, and Facebook have swallowed most of their former contestant on a global scale. Frequently, this has started rising blame for monopolistic behavior, censorship, and misuse of user data.
Many nations still have many flourishing national websites and social networks (Russia, China, Japan, India, Indonesia, South Korea, Iran).
Inspired by the design of historical maps and by the “Map of Online Communities” by Randall Munroe, Mapmaker from Slovakia Martin Vargic created the world map of the most popular websites throughout 2020-2021.
Compared to an earlier iteration of the World Internet Map, this new version of the world map is more comprehensive and informative. It comprises many thousand of some of the most popular websites, described as different “nations,” which are arranged with others of similar type or category, forming dozens of separate clusters, regions, and continents that extend throughout the world map, such as “search engines, “news sites,” “social networks,” “e-commerce,” “adult entertainment,” “file sharing,” “software firms” and so much more. In the middle of the map poster, Internet service providers and web browsers form the core and spine of the internet as we know it, while the far south is the area of the mysterious “dark web.”
Color designs of websites are based on the predominant colors of their user interface or logo. To add more detail and give deeper insight, many features and services provided by these websites, sections and content categories, and distinguished content creators are marked as cities and towns (which number well over 10,000). Website authors and CEOs are shown as capital cities. At the same time, hundreds of the most popular users of social networks and influencers can be found in the realms of Youtube, Facebook, or Twitter. Mountains, highlands, seas, and valleys depict different aspects of the internet, culture, and computer science overall. At the same time, about a hundred of some of the most famous internet and computing pioneers are also highlighted on the map in the names of undersea ridges.
The poster also includes much supplemental information (the top most popular websites, largest internet-related companies, influential sites blocked in China, etc.). Atlas of several smaller maps shows the share of the population using the internet, speed of broadband, levels of internet restriction, and the most popular social network by nation, etc.
The main map’s relative territorial sizes on the main world map are based on their average Alexa web traffic ranking between January 2020 and January 2021.
Map of Internet Activity A.D. 2010.
