Mark Graham and Stefano De Stabbata, two researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute, have created a map that shows each country’s most popular website. The map-makers have changed the size of nations to reflect the number of Internet users.
The Atlantic Cities Blog analyzes the things outside of the Google-Facebook bubble:
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.
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.
Steve Clowney