The so-called video streaming wars got another important round in 2021 with new players appearing and old ones having amazing numbers — not only in subscribers, revenue, and content budgets but also in… Internet traffic. In our ranking, Netflix is still the undefeated hero.
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.
The days of the year when Netflix was more popular? January was a great month with Netflix reaching the #4 spot in our global ranking in the first two days of the year (and also all the weekends of January, Fridays included), going through February in the #5 place. For the rest of 2021, the platform was mostly #7. Yes, on the weekends Netflix seems to have a better performance in our ranking.
Roku.com seems to be the next video streaming platform after those two traffic giants, getting around the #80 position in our ranking through 2021. In late 2020 Hulu.com was the next one, but HBOMax.com surpassed Hulu in July 2021 and entered our top 100 list. In 2021, Disneyplus.com also rose in our ranking and surpassed the app-based TV service Sling.com later in the year. Our top 10 chart also includes Iq.com (iQiyi), the Chinese online video platform.
Top 10 — Most popular video streaming domains (late) 2021
Amazon.com is a domain, as we already explained, with more than e-commerce services (that’s why globally it ranks between #4 and #6). In 2021, it had some good days in January and in late April 2021, reaching #4, but by the end of the year it got its best days in our ranking, especially on the day before Cyber Monday, November 28, and on December 1 and 6 — it reached #5.
Taobao.com had its best day of the year in our global ranking on August 20 — #15 — and by the popular Chinese shopping day, Singles’ Day, November 11, it was #17.
Ebay.com had a solid year and a good late August (#29 on August 31) and grew more after Cyber Monday, peaking on December 1, reaching #27.
Shopify had a great August (reaching #100 on August 18), the same with Etsy.com that peaked at #128 on August 21. Walmart had a great June (#66) and also end of November (it reached #70).
Ikea.com had a big increase in importance throughout the year and got very near to Homedepot.com’s position in September (peaked in the #695 position in our global ranking), staying up through November.
Best Buy peaked on October 6 and had a high growth throughout November, also matching Shopify in December.
When we look to Shein.com we see that it peaked last Christmas and is on the rise since November 2021
Shein.com, the global Chinese online fast-fashion retailer, went high in our ranking for the Christmas of 2020 — it went ahead of Bestbuy.com and Target.com from December 19 to 24, 2020, reaching the #253 position. In March, it had another peak, and it got the best position in 2021 in our ranking after Cyber Monday — it reached #301 on December 1, 2021.
2021: A Space Odyssey (for NASA, SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic)
This year was also a big year for space travel with several achievements. Spacecraft from three Mars exploration programs from the United Arab Emirates, China, and the United States arrived at Mars in February — NASA’s Perseverance rover landed on February 18, 2021, and after that the Ingenuity drone made history, being the first powered aircraft flight on another planet in human history. And there is also another big space event just around the corner — the James Webb Telescope launch.
Virgin Galactic (July 11), Blue Origin (July 20) and SpaceX (September 16 — but with several other events before that regarding satellites and reuse of space capsules) also stormed the Internet with space tourism achievements with different scopes. Only SpaceX offered an orbital ride.
In terms of domains, NASA.gov was way ahead of the others, but Elon Musk’s SpaceX.com was definitely second in our global ranking, followed by Blueorigin.com. Virgingalactic.com only appears once in our top 100k ranking on July 17 and 18 (a few days after Richard Branson’s spaceflight).
Since last year NASA is high on our global ranking, in the top 1,000 domains of our list, but after the rover Perseverance landed on Mars on February 18 NASA.gov entered our top 700 ranking — the highest day of that month was February 25, when it reached #657. In the summer it went down in our ranking, but it picked up in late September and on October 13, 2021, reached the highest position of the year (#637). That was the day the press conference about NASA’s Lucy mission, the agency’s first to Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids, took place (the launch was on October 16).
SpaceX.com had a great start of February, it entered our top 8,000, a month with a launch of 60 new Starlink internet satellites into orbit amidst a missed rocket landing and a fresh $850 million of new investment. And then it was after September 16, 2021, with the first orbital launch of an all-private crew, Inspiration4, that it flew again in our ranking.
For Blue Origin, after a strong start of the year — it reached our #32,000 on January 10 (a few days before New Shepard 4’s first test flight) — it went up between July 20- 27 after its first crewed flight, with Jeff Bezos onboard. It also went up in our ranking a few days after October 13, 2021 (the day William Shatner flew aboard a Blue Origin suborbital capsule).
Messaging or chat: WhatsApp, what else?
There aren’t as many messaging or chat platforms as there are popular social media sites, video streaming, or e-commerce platforms. So, this ranking is slim, and even slimmer because Messenger (uses Facebook.com) or iMessage (uses Apple.com) aren’t included. Snapchat is both a social media platform and a messaging app — the same with Instagram — and we added them in the social media ranking.
If they were here they would be higher than Telegram but behind WhatsApp — Instagram actually started 2021 (it got to #8) in front of WhatsApp until February and went as low as #13 and Snapchat went between #29 to #16.
From our standpoint, WhatsApp is the undisputed leader of the messaging apps ranging from as low as #13 in our global ranking to as high as #8. Its best parts of the year were late March, late April, late October and then late November going through December 2021 as #8 in our ranking.
The only that is closer is Telegram.org, ranging from #170 to #88 (peaked in October 2021) throughout the year.
How Signal skyrocketed in January (and WeChat in February)
All the others are far away in our ranking, but 2021 brought three trends we should highlight:
Signal.org had an incredible month of January — on January 3 it was in #1815 in our ranking and by January 20 it rose to #766, a climb in more than 1,000 positions in just 17 days. Why? WhatsApp’s new privacy policy was in the headlines in the second week of January.
WeChat.com also had an amazing jump in our ranking, but more in February and by April it surpassed Signal.org — it went from #3142 at the start of February to #979 by April 25 and by October both of the messaging apps were almost tied at ~#370 and had a significantly higher place in our ranking than in late 2020. Telegram.org on the other hand started the year on a high note, #107, and rose to #102 after the first week of January, but lost positions in our ranking after that. In August started to grow more to reach the #88 spot we already mentioned — by then, WhatsApp was #10 in our ranking.
“You can’t just materialize anywhere in the Metaverse, like Captain Kirk beaming down from on high. This would be confusing and irritating to the people around you. It would break the metaphor. Materializing out of nowhere (or vanishing back into Reality) is considered to be a private function best done in the confines of your own House.“
― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (1992)
Metaverse: Don’t mess with Roblox
Back in November, we heard in the halls of Web Summit — the 42,000 in-person tech global event in Lisbon — that in a way the metaverse is already here (Roblox’s Global Head of Music had some thoughts on virtual concerts). But we’re still far from the promise of almost living in the virtual world that books like Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash or Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One showed us.
Oculus shipped a lot of headsets and there are immersive experiences out there that are Metaverse-like (a step further than the now-usual-for-most spending all day working, learning, communicating through a screen) and we focused on that ones, like Fortnite, Roblox, Second Life (the oldest, from 2003), Minecraft and Oculus. But Oculus.com doesn’t have enough direct traffic (playing games using Oculus headset could direct the traffic elsewhere) to be in our top 100k domains ranking, and the same happens with Minecraft.
Oculus.com and Minecraft.net are not in our 100,000 ranking
The (short) list from 2020 and 2021 shows us that Roblox.com surpassed Epicgames.com (the home of the popular Fortnite) for the first time in July reaching back then #27 in our list. But it was after late September that it was consistently in front of the rival game platform, ending the year on a good note reaching #20 in our ranking.
Epicgames.com (Fortnite) started the year a lot better, reaching #14 on January 5, 2021, but it started to lose importance in February and that deepened after May, but mostly in July and August. It never truly recovered and ended the year between #26 and #47, depending on the day.
Conclusion: Human (online) trends
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. 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.
And remember: you can keep an eye on Cloudflare Radar to monitor how we see Internet traffic globally and in every country.
(Update 12/22/2021: We have corrected the data about Telegram.org — the domain that was used initially wasn’t the right one.)
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