Age of Internet Empires: One Map With Each Country's Favorite Website
Facebook, Google, and—a newspaper?
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The map makes for a brief, informative look at how geographic—and universal—certain web tastes and habits are.
And even where it isn’t the most popular site, Google is still powerful. “The power of Google on the Internet becomes starkly evident if we also look at the second most visited website in every country,” Graham and De Stabbata write:
What of the rest of the world? Baidu dominates China, though its spill-over popularity into neighboring countries makes the researchers doubt whether data from those countries is accurate. Yahoo! succeeds in Japan and Taiwan through its nearly two-decade-old partnership with Japanese SoftBank and its 2007 purchase of Wretch, a Taiwanese social networking site.Among the 50 countries that have Facebook listed as the most visited visited website, 36 of them have Google as the second most visited, and the remaining 14 countries list YouTube (currently owned by Google).
Elsewhere: Yandex, a search engine, is Russia’s most popular site; an email client is most popular in Kazakhstan. Data from central African nations appear unavailable, which makes me wonder if the starting data included mobile web. (If so, Facebook might be doing well there, too.)
Perhaps most interesting to me are the Palestinian Territories, where a newspaper (a newspaper!), The Al-Watan Voice, is most popular.
Graham and De Stabbata also styled their map Age of Exploration-style, visible at the very top of this post. They seem most interested in, and concerned by, the power inherent in these homogeneous data empires. “We are likely still in the very beginning of the Age of Internet Empires,” they write:
But, it may well be that the territories carved out now will have important implications for which companies end up controlling how we communicate and access information for many years to come.
