From 1996 to 2013: How is the once popular website doing now?

From 1996 to 2013: How is the once popular website doing now?

ComScore, a website that provides Internet digital analysis services, recently compiled a list of the top websites in December every year since 1996 (click here for a larger picture). Many interesting things can be found in this densely packed yet traceable table, such as the growth trajectory of Google (which looked like this back then) and Facebook.

AOL and Yahoo were already on the list at the beginning, and some of the other popular websites were school websites; some were unheard of, such as "GNN" and "Teleport", which disappeared within a year. Moreover, across 18 years, the list includes Yahoo, which has never left the top three, and CNET, which fluctuated in the middle and finally dropped out of the list; and Excite, which was very powerful at the turn of the century, disappeared after its last appearance in the list in 2002.

The chart also clearly shows the competition and mergers and acquisitions of companies. For example, in 2001, when Google appeared, Altavista, a popular search engine, quietly disappeared from the list; and Infoseek, another search engine founded in 1994 and the world's first advertising search engine, was bought by Disney in 1998, and then Go was born. It is said that a Chinese engineer from Infoseek developed a search engine after returning to Beijing, and its name was Baidu. At the same time, Lycos, a once popular search engine and portal website, fell into decline and was gradually replaced by Google and Yahoo.

In 1999, Yahoo acquired Geocities, which ranked third, and retained its second place; MSN and Microsoft also merged together. In the same year, two Stanford graduates took their website to the CEO's office of Excite and said they wanted to sell it for one million dollars, but were rejected. Two years later, this website was strongly listed, squeezing Excite out of the list by ten places. Yes, it is called Google.

In terms of media content, the New York Times was listed in 2002 as a traditional media that successfully transformed, and barely held on for four years; in the same year, Time Warner began to occupy the top few positions after acquiring AOL, and five years later, AOL separated from the group and returned to the third position. Turner Media Group (mainly engaged in news, entertainment and television industries), which also belongs to Time Warner, appeared in 2008 when AOL left, at the same time as another unknown Glam Media, and has maintained a good position to this day; and Turner's rise is also accompanied by the decline of Fox.

During this period, e-commerce websites including Walmart and Ebay have seen their rankings decline year after year, while Amazon has remained stable with a slight improvement. From 2004 to 2009, the rankings of major websites began to stabilize. It can be seen that there are less than five companies in light gray, which are not frequently on the list, and the lowest number in one year is only two (2008, is it because of the financial crisis?). However, Apple rose during this period and was listed for the first time in 2005, which happened to be the peak period of iPod (release of U2 and Harry Potter special edition) and the time when iPhone began to be secretly developed.

The rankings of another type of crowdsourcing website, including the question-and-answer website Ask (formerly known as Ask Jeeves) and Wikipedia (later developed into Wikimedia), have remained roughly stable.

Compared with other Internet companies with troubled fates, Facebook's development trajectory is simply smooth sailing. After experiencing three jumps in three years, it has remained in the fourth position. However, what is more interesting is that About, which disappeared from the list in 2004, has returned ten years later. This table makes people sigh and more curious about the ups and downs of the Internet industry in the future.