For Statista, data journalist Martin Armstrong has researched the number of websites available worldwide and found out interesting facts. While only ten websites were online by the end of 1992, today there are 1.72 billion. Important: A website is only a website if it has its own host name.

The British physicist Tim Bernes-Lee worked at CERN in Switzerland and published the very first website, the WorldWideWeb (W3), on 6 August 1991. By the end of 1992, ten more websites had followed into the online world, and after CERN made the W3 technology available to the public free of charge in 1993, the Internet began to grow to its present size.

When the young Yahoo! was founded in 1994 as the first web directory, there were nearly 3,000 websites. Funfact: Yahoo! was originally called “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web”. Google followed in 1998, when there were already over two million websites on the market. Facebook was made available to all mankind in 2004, when there were already 51.6 million websites. 12 years later, in 2017, the online world experienced the absolute peak of website numbers: 1.76 billion. Today it is 1.72 billion less, but the number of websites continues to grow.