In this article, I'll be writing about the top 6 most visited websites in history, excluding search engines largely because search engines are what bridge the gaps between our personal computers and the information that exists on the World Wide Web. The internet in its short lifespan has had a rich and complex history intimately linked with the real world over the past 15 years. The statistics presented in this article all come from Alexa Internet, an Amazon web traffic data and analytics collection company.

Number 6 - Taobao

Short History - Taobao is basically China's Amazon and ranks just one spot above Amazon itself on this list. It was founded by Alibaba Group on May 10, 2003. The founder of the Alibaba group is Jack Ma, a Chinese business magnate. The website facilitates consumer to consumer retail and consists of around 80% of China's online shopping market.

Launch Date - May 10, 2003

Marketplace value - $144.9 billion

Fun Fact - Taobao is written exclusively in PHP, not mixing coding language in the slightest. It's mascot is also an ant which represents their corporate culture, take that as you will….

Take this little snippet from Wikipedia on the reason for the ant being their mascot:

“Ma [Company CEO] introduced Taobao to the outside world by stating, 'We are the ant army.' Ma once organized more than 2,000 employees at a gymnasium to celebrate the 5th anniversary of the founding ceremony. At the party, Taobao employees waved the Taobao mascot — the flag of 'ants.' At the end of the celebration that lasted for four hours, all the employees stood hand-in-hand, singing 'If you do not experience wind and rain, you cannot see the rainbow. The ants that be organized together can beat the elephant.'"

Number 5 - Reddit

Short History - With the slogan, “front page of the internet", Reddit is an American social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website. Created on June 23, 2005 by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian. Roommates at the University of Virginia, the website was originally and still is mostly owned by Conde Nast Publications and the website today draws in 542 million monthly visitors, with 234 million unique visitors. It is the #4 most visited website in the U.S. and the #14 most visited in the world. Based in none other than California, the website has a multitude of pages called subreddits where users can form communities, or villages, based off of unique shared interests and or subjects. Snoop dog and others held a fundraising for the website in 2014 which raised $50 million for the site, and their investment saw the company valued at $500 million.

Launch Date - June 23, 2005

Company Value - $500 million

Fun Fact - Reddit was written exclusively in Python and currently has only 100 employees.

Number 4 - Yahoo

Short History - Yahoo is an American multinational technology company headquartered in none other that California. Amazon was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994 and was incorporated on March 2, 1995. One of the earliest pioneers of the early internet, Yahoo today is known as a web portal, and the only reason they are included on this list despite having a search engine is that they have a slew of other functionalities including news, finance, groups, answers, video sharing, fantasy sports, online mapping, social media (tumblr, flickr), and most influentially, yahoo mail. Yahoo still has a large number of people using their mail service. Yahoo is the highest read news media website with over 7 billion views per month.

Net Worth - $48 billion

“Fun" Facts - Verizon purchased Yahoo's core internet business for $4.83 billion in July 2016. These assets were merged with AOL to form a new entity known as Oath; Yahoo, AOL, and the Huffington post which are now all under the Oath umbrella. This deal excludes Yahoo's 15% stake in the Alibaba Group (remember Taobao?) and a 35% stake in Yahoo Japan.

In September 2016 Yahoo disclosed a data breach that occurred in late 2014 which released information of at least 500 million user accounts. The U.S. indicated four men, including two employees of Russia's Federal Security Service, for their involvement in the hack. A separate breach was revealed in December of 2016 where in which hackers obtained security questions and other sensitive material of at least one billion accounts. These breaches caused the purchase of Yahoo by Verizon to decrease by $350 million and caused a 2% increase in the Yahoo stock price. Failure to maintain security making a stock more valuable, huh.

Number 3 - Baidu(Disqualified because this website is a search engine. Included because the history is still relevant and interesting)

Short History - Baidu Incorporated, incorporated on January 18, 2000, is a Chinese-American web services company headquartered at the Baidu Campus in Beijing's Haidian District. Baidu offers search engines for websites, an online encyclopedia in Chinese, and a searchable keyword-based discussion forum. The company was created by Robin Li and Eric Xu, both of whom studied and worked abroad before returning to China. Technically, this is considered a search engine and prior to writing this article I had no idea China had a Google equivalent, but before moving onto the REAL number three, we can look a few of their basic stats.

Launch Date - January 1, 2000

Equity Value - $92.2 Billion

Fun Fact - Baidu has a long history of being the most proactive and restrictive online censor in the search arena. A leak in 2009 showed a lengthy list of blocked websites. In May 2011, activists sued Baidu in the United States for violating the U.S. Constitution by censorship it conducts in accord with the demand of the Chinese government. A U.S. judge ruled that the Chinese search engine has the right to block pro-democracy content from its search engine, allegedly dismissing the case.

Number 3 - Wikipedia

Short History - “Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia with the aim to allow anyone to edit articles. Wikipedia is the largest and most popular general reference work on it'sthe Internet and is ranked among the ten most popular websites. Wikipedia is owned by the nonprofitWikimedia Foundation.“ -Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a huge center for information that you can go on to find information on just about any topic and find information on just about anything you'd like. Want to know the historical significance of Oulu, Finland? You can find that on Wikipedia! Wikipedia also puts within its citations outside sources that are more directly related to the topic it is talking about to retain a higher amount of accountability in its articles, something that gives the website its credibility (despite controversy in academia that would state otherwise).

Wikipedia is available in 295 languages and has 312,808 active contributors who contribute to the website not out of a vested interest in money, but in information sharing. While there were collaborative attempts at online encyclopedias before Wikipedia, none were quite as successful. The website started off as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online English-language encyclopedia whose articles were written by experts and reviewed under a formal process. Nupedia was founded on March 9, 2000 under the ownership of Bomis, a web portal company. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger are credited with the birth of this pre-Wikipedia encyclopedia known as Nupedia. Wales is credits with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia, while Sanger is credited with the strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal.

Launch Date - January 15, 2001.

Company Value - $6.6 billion dollars

Fun Fact - Wikipedia gets over 18 billion page views a month and 500 million unique visitors a month, trailing Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft, and Google. Wikipedia is also a portmanteau.

Number 2 - Facebook

Short History - Facebook is an American for-profit company and an online social media and social networking service based in Menlo Park, California. Facebook was created by Mark Zuckerberg and fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. The website was initially limited to Harvard students only but eventually expanded to higher education institutions in the Boston area, namely Ivy League Schools. Eventually access was granted to other universities, high schools, and in 2006 anyone age 13 and over was allowed to become a Facebook user. Facebook's name comes from the face book directories often given to U.S. University Students. A good movie to watch about the history of Facebook from the perspective of Mark Zuckerberg is "The Social Network," I recommend checking it out!

Launch Date - February 4, 2004. Worldwide access in 2005.

Net worth - $10.2 Billion

Fun fact - Facebook has over 1.86 billion active users, accounting for ¼ the world's population.

Number 1 - YouTube

Short history - I bet you didn't expect this, huh? YouTube is an American video sharing website created by former PayPal employees Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim in February 2005. In November 2006, Google purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion and today YouTube operates as a Google subsidiary. It's popular slogan “Broadcast Yourself" was removed in 2012, perhaps hinting at a change in company direction in the coming years. YouTube is popular worldwide and had redefined the media's role in our society today, allowing anyone's voice to be heard, changing the scope of the media from only those in Hollywood, to anyone who has access to a camera and the internet, which is virtually everyone who owns a smartphone today.

Personal Comments - YouTube is one of my favorite websites and has been ever since I first started going online and can remember opening my first account back in 2008. I have considered writing an article about the direction in which YouTube is heading in, including the hurdles the website faces in the coming years and is currently facing. However, that will have to wait until another time.

Launch Date - February 12, 2005

Value - ~$70 to $103 billion, according to this source and this source. However these does not account for the running cost of the website.

Fun Fact - YouTube has had an April Fools Day Prank every year since 2008, including all the featured videos on the home page redirecting to Rick Astley's “Never Gonna Give You Up" during the first year.