Many years ago I co-founded a website called Wikinut which allowed users to add their written content and earn ad-revenue. It was moderately successful for a period, and ended up on a poster of the top million websites in the world.
The project that generated the poster was pretty clever. They used the Alexa ranking service to catalogue the top million sites in 2013, and then downloaded all their favicons.
A very best script then scaled the favicons by visitor reach, and clustered them by colour. The end result was quite beautiful:
You can see all the giants in the centre… Google leading the way, Facebook, YouTube etc. This was really before mobile apps had really exploded and so was one of the last periods that basing popularity on website traffic was accurate.
As you move out from the centre, the icons become smaller representing the proportionally lower levels of traffic.
But where is Wikinut I hear you cry?
Let’s zoom into the LinkedIn region…
And then again…
And then again…
Wait for it…
And there she is… a blue background with a white/green “wn”. Proudly sat in the top million sites alongside the trillion dollar giants.