The internet, year by year

22 years of the internet, each with what a home connection actually was, what storage cost, how many sites there were and how long a download took. The lists of what launched are the easy part. The arithmetic underneath them is what makes a year make sense.

Everything in one table

What actually changed

• Connection speed went from 9.6 kbps to 100 Mbps — a factor of about 10,417.
• A gigabyte of storage went from $9,000 to $0.020 — a factor of about 450,000.
• The web went from 1 hostname to 1,295,973,827.
• A 4 GB film went from 40 days to 6 minutes.

The storage figure is the one that explains the most. Almost everything that felt impossible in one decade and ordinary in the next — free webmail with a gigabyte, a thousand songs in a pocket, video hosting given away — became possible because storage got cheap faster than anything else did.

Year by year

• The internet in 1991 The web goes public, and there is exactly one website.
• The internet in 1993 Mosaic puts pictures on the same page as text, and the web stops being a document store.
• The internet in 1994 The first banner ad appears, and its click-through rate is 44 per cent.
• The internet in 1995 Amazon, eBay and JavaScript all arrive in the same year.
• The internet in 1996 Webmail arrives, and your email address stops belonging to your internet provider.
• The internet in 1998 Google is founded, and searching stops being useless.
• The internet in 1999 Napster arrives and the music industry discovers what a fast connection is for.
• The internet in 2000 The dot-com bubble bursts in March and takes most of it with it.
• The internet in 2001 Wikipedia launches in January, and nobody expects it to work.
• The internet in 2003 MySpace, Skype, iTunes and WordPress all launch, and the social web starts.
• The internet in 2004 Facebook launches at Harvard, and Gmail offers a gigabyte as an April Fool.
• The internet in 2005 YouTube launches, and video stops needing a plugin and a prayer.
• The internet in 2006 Twitter starts, Facebook opens to everyone, and the feed is invented.
• The internet in 2007 The iPhone arrives, and the internet stops being something you sit down for.
• The internet in 2008 The App Store opens, and software starts being something you tap once to get.
• The internet in 2010 Instagram launches, and the phone camera becomes the point of the phone.
• The internet in 2012 Gangnam Style passes a billion views and breaks YouTube's counter.
• The internet in 2013 Snowden, and encryption stops being a niche concern.
• The internet in 2015 A photograph of a dress divides the internet for a week.
• The internet in 2016 Pokémon Go empties offices, and TikTok launches quietly in China.
• The internet in 2018 GDPR arrives, and every website in the world grows a cookie banner.
• The internet in 2020 Everyone finds out at once whether their home connection is good enough.