Google was founded when many parts of the world were still using 56k dial-up products. The company was already making millions of dollars, before the mobile age took over.
When mobile internet became common, Google is still dominating through its various products, most notably, using Android. With its many products, the search giant has been considered the biggest domain on the internet, with its brand name acting as a jumping-off point for much of the rest of the web.
Despite Google's ubiquitous presence, the company weakness is having a proper social media network.
And because of this as well as among other reasons, Google is dethroned by TikTok.
The youthful social media managed to push Google down a place, and becomes the most popular domain in the world.
That according to a study by the network security company Cloudflare.
The study suggests that TikTok leaped six places up on the list, after finishing at seventh place in 2020.
Besides TikTok's massive leap, the rest remains largely unchanged, with Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple all pushed down.
The top ten websites/apps domains worldwide in 2021 were:
- TikTok.
- Google.
- Facebook.
- Microsoft.
- Apple.
- Amazon.
- Netflix.
- YouTube.
- Twitter.
- WhatsApp.
By ending up first on the list, TikTok is considered the most popular social media platform that is more popular than Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
The study suggests that people are spending more of their times watching videos than they are checking their emails or writing work documents, or searching for something using Google or viewing videos on YouTube, or spending moments on Netflix or scrolling down Twitter's feed.
With more than one billion active users worldwide, at least 21% of all internet users globally access TikTok's domain.
According to Cloudflare, TikTok that is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, reached its peak on February 17 for the first time. The platform, which publishes short videos, temporarily took first place in March and May, but it was not until August 10 that it managed to stay in the lead for several days.
TikTok fully took the lead in October, November and December.
TikTok even dominated important holidays like Thanksgiving that happened on November 25 and also on Black Friday that was on November 26.
TikTok became immensely popular thank to its endless list of short-form viral pranks, memes, and vlogs.
Cloudfare that tracks domain traffic data, believes that one of the reasons for the surge is because of the COVID-19 pandemic, as lockdowns meant people were stuck at home and looking for entertainment.
As for the content that was viral on TikTok, many included Jungkook, a member of BTS, a South Korean boyband.
Based on the hashtags being used, Jungkook is considered the most popular person on TikTok, as he reigns the platform with more than a hundred billion views.
According to Allkpop, which delivers Kpop celebrity news and gossips, Jungkook also owns the titles for the most-viewed and most-liked fancam on Tiktok.
As for the most popular streaming platform, Cloudflare places Netflix on the top of its list.
"We added YouTube.com (its most important service is free) to the list to compare with the big numbers from Netflix, and still, the Squid Game phenomenon platform won our ranking for most of the year. Amazon Prime is not included because the streaming service mainly uses Amazon.com (ranked #5 or #6 most of the year) as a domain," Cloudflare explains.
Other on its list include:
- Most popular e-commerce domains: Amazon.
- Most popular chat domains: WhatsApp.
- Most popular metaverse domains: Roblox.
"The Internet is not a quiet place, the same way humans on Earth (especially during a pandemic) aren’t quiet or passive but active and reactive," Cloudflare concluded.
"Although on the top of our domain ranking there don’t seem to be drastic ups and downs throughout the year (TikTok, and YouTube, were the exceptions), we saw how an event like the Myanmar coup and the subsequent viral video may have brought YouTube to #1 on our ranking. We also saw how e-commerce was affected throughout the year, how space-related websites had a big (online) year with important events, and how Netflix rose around Christmas time."
It's worth noting that Cloudflare's ranking is derived from its public DNS resolver 1.1.1.1, meaning that it's not related to the number of unique users or visitors it gets per month.
What this means, in this case, Facebook is still way above TikTok in terms of raw numbers, as the social giant still has the most users.
