Map of the Internet 2023

I was after a simple visualisation of the most popular online properties (websites *and* apps), showing their relative reach. I couldn’t find one.

So I drew a map.

It represents 51 of the most popular websites and apps, as of January 2023, with the size of each territory roughly correlating to monthly active users (estimated where official MAUs aren’t available).

I tried to cluster them into continents - social, search and AV, gaming, commerce, news and productivity, reference - but many services don’t fit neatly into a single category (TikTok arguably has a place in all of them).

For this version, I’ve only included English language properties and have excluded adult sites.

You can download a high-res version of the map here.

If you’d like a nice, high-quality print for your wall, you can order one here, with or without a frame.

A few things that struck me whilst collating the data for this:

• Whilst a Goliath in the world of e-commerce, Amazon is small in terms of MAUs relative to Google, Facebook and YouTube (obviously excluding AWS, which is more of a tectonic plate on which most of these properties sit).

• The map would look very different if I’d used time spent or data transferred (Netflix and YouTube would be *much* bigger) or even visits (which would upweight the likes of Twitter and Wikipedia).

• There are some scale services that get relatively little coverage (e.g. Viber, Likee), some because they’re not yet big in Western markets (e.g. SHAREit, imo) and some seemingly because they’re just not considered sexy enough (e.g. Fandom, Quora).

• ChatGPT wouldn’t have been on this map had I finished it before I saw this news story yesterday 😮