Many of the top behemoths operate many platforms and content streams, which in turn helped them to rise into the top 20 internet giants that currently rule the web.
With each passing year, a larger and larger portion of the population forgets about graphics loading one pixel row at a time, the ear splitting noise of a 56k modem, or web portal dominance in the early days.
In 1998, many of the most popular websites were news aggregators or search engines, which are simple notions to grasp. Today, however, as Nick Routley of Visual Capitalist explains below, brand touchpoints are frequently dispersed across devices (e.g. mobile apps vs. desktop) and a plethora of services and sub-brands (e.g. Facebook's constellation of apps). As a result, the world's most popular websites are intricately linked online properties.
The visualisation below, which mostly uses data from ComScore's U.S. Multi-Platform Properties ranking, examines which of the internet's behemoths have grown to st...