A World Wide View of Browsing the World Wide Web

In this paper, we perform the first large-scale study of how people use and spend time on the web. Our study is based on anonymous, aggregated telemetry data from a major web browser with several hundred million users globally. Our study considers only users who chose to explicitly enable sharing URLs with the browser vendor and have usage statistic reporting enabled. We analyze the distribution of web traffic, the types of popular sites that people visit and spend the most time on, differences between desktop and mobile browsing behavior, geographical differences in web usage, and the websites popular in regions worldwide. Our study sheds light on both online user behavior and how the measurement community can better analyze the web in future research studies.