Age of Empires, Google Facebook Internet Domination

Google Facebook Internet Domination

Google, Facebook, Yahoo and YouTube feature in most of our lives but how do they feature on the global scale?

The map, created by researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute, (show below) used data from millions of people’s browsing history and shows Google (red) as the most popular site (62 countries) Facebook (blue) 2nd (50 countries) whilst Yahoo (purple) dominates Japan.

This map illustrates the most visited website in each country. The map uses freely available data retrieved from Alexa. The data used for this visualization were calculated using a combination of the estimated average daily unique visitors to a site and the estimated number of page views on that site from users in that country over the past month (July/August 2013).

• Google, 62 countries. Facebook, 50 countries. Baidu, 2 countries, Yahoo, 2 countries, AlWatan Voice, 1 country, Mail.ru, 1 country, Yandex, 1 country.

The data are visualised as a choropleth map using the hexagonal cartogram of the Internet Population 2011, where the colour indicates each country’s most visited website.

• A choropleth map is a thematic map in which areas are shaded or patterned in proportion to the measurement of the statistical variable being displayed on the map, such as population density or per-capita income. The choropleth map provides an easy way to visualize how a measurement varies across a geographic area or it shows the level of variability within a region. [Wikipedia]

Findings

The dominance of two companies, Google and Facebook, whose colours (red and blue, respectively) cover most of the map is clearly apparent. There is an interesting geographical continuity of these two empires. Google is the most visited website in most of Europe, North America, and Oceania. Facebook, in contrast, is the most visited website in most of the Middle East and North Africa, as well as much of the Spanish-speaking Americas.

In Asia local competitors have been able to resist the two large American empires. Baidu is well known as the most used search engine in China, the world’s largest Internet population at over half a billion users. A puzzling fact is that Baidu is also listed as the most visited website in South Korea where you might expect the popular South Korean search engine, Naver to rule.

In Japan, Yahoo! in join venture with SoftBank rules. The Al-Watan Voice newspaper is the most visited website in the Palestinian Territories, the e-mail service Mail.ru is the most visited in Kazakhstan, the social network VK the most visited in Belarus, and the search engine Yandex the most visited in Russia.

• The power of Google on the Internet becomes starkly evident if we also look at the second most visited website in every country. Among the 50 countries that have Facebook listed as the most visited website, 36 of them have Google as the second most visited, and the remaining 14 countries list YouTube (owned by Google).

The countries where Google is the most visited website account for half of the entire Internet population, over one billion people. Thanks to the large Internet population of China and South Korea, Baidu is second in this rank, as these two countries account for more than half a billion Internet users, whereas the 50 countries where Facebook is the most visited website account for only about 280 million users, placing the social network website in third position.

‘We are likely still in the very beginning of the Age of Internet Empires,’ the researchers conclude.

‘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.’

Well, I hope you found something useful and enjoyed, Age of Empires, Google Facebook Internet Domination.