While it represents only a quarter of all traffic, the firm offers its data insights for readers to assemble answers with

As the year comes to a close, a cloud connectivity firm that handles a quarter of the internet traffic worldwide has released a list of seven characteristics and patterns throughout the 12 months.

First, the most popular search engine and browser (for the third year in a row in the firm’s metrics) has continued to be Google’s, even as antitrust investigations loom against it. The market shares of internet browsers were: Chrome (65.73%), Safari (15.43%), Edge (6.81%), Firefox (4.05%), and Samsung Internet (2.71%) among the top five.

Second, when it comes to the most popular commercial online service, the ranking in descending order is: Google, Facebook, Apple, and Tik Tok.

Other 2024 traffic statistics

Third, despite a growing field of competitors and a series of leadership shakeups, OpenAI was the most popular generative AI service for the second year in a row, followed by Character.AI, Codeium, QuillBot, and Anthropic’s Claude. Also:

  • The leading social media platforms were: Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, X and Snapchat.
  • For the whole of 2024 traffic managed by the firm, internet outages were due mostly to government-directed Internet shutdowns (both regional and national), amounting to over 220 incidents, compared to 180 in 2023 data.
  • The top five messaging services in terms of traffic were from WhatsApp, QQ, Telegram, Viber, WeChat.
  • The top five in rankings of financial services traffic are: Stripe, TradingView, Alipay, PayPal and Nubank (BR).
  • For cryptocurrency services, top-five traffic rankings go to Binance, Coinbase, OKX, 2miners.com and CoinMarketCap.
  • In the world of Metaverse and Gaming services, Roblox, Xbox, Epic Games/Fortnite, Steam and PlayStation traffic led the pack.
  • The main video streaming services in the traffic data were: YouTube, Netflix, Twitch, Roku and Disney Plus.
  • The top five news organizations leading the traffic statistics were: Globo, BBC, NY Times, CNN and Fox News.
  • E-commerce firms with the highest traffic were: Amazon, Taobao, AliExpress, Shopify and Temu.

According to Cloudflare, the cloud connectivity sharing its 2024 data traffic trends, “creating rankings is a team effort that comes with its own challenges and requires careful attention and frequent updates.”