Openai.com: 19th Most Visited Globally; Yet 49th In US!

Big Thanks to Similarweb! For the raw website traffic data. By individual country. 

Source: https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites.

All rankings are for last month. Nov 2023.

Disclaimer: One month doesn't make a trend. Naturally. But then, Nov was the month of the public boardroom drama at OpenAI! Involving Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever and Microsoft. Shouldn't that count for something? :)

Worldwide, openai.com was the 19th most visited site. Jumping two places from Oct. Average visit lasting 5 min: 21 sec. And 5.34 pages viewed per visit.

Ahead of linkedin.com, office.com, netflix.com, pinterest.com, microsoft.com, zoom.us, quora.com, ebay.com ... and others.

Hardly a surprise. After all, ChatGPT had taken just 5 days to surpass 1 mill users. Back in Dec 2022. When it was released for public use.

Been a year since then. Has it penetrated all geographies equally? By now? Especially when OpenAI's mission is to "ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity"?

When we break the rankings down, a few countries stand out.

Example: Turns out openai.com was the 6th most visited site in Morocco. Among all sites within Morocco itself, of course. Just to be clear, this doesn't mean Morocco had the 6th most openai.com visitors out of all countries internationally. Far from it! Rather, these are in-country rankings.

Here's the pattern that emerges.

Middle East and North Africa: As we said, 6th most visited site in Morocco. 7th in Qatar. 8th in Iraq and in Kuwait. Coincidence?

South East Asia: 10th most popular site in Malaysia and in Philippines. 14th in Singapore. 17th in Indonesia.

Nordic Region: 22nd in Finland. 23rd in Denmark and in Norway.

Isolated exceptions: 6th highest ranked in web traffic in Sweden and in Colombia. 17th in Chile.

Developed Western world: Openai.com was, however, only the 49th most popular site in the US. And did not even figure among the Top 50 in the UK, Germany, Netherlands, Italy, Greece, Hungary or Czech Republic.

Surprise? Given their technological advancement, progressive mindset and history of innovation?

Are openai.com visitors relatively fewer because these are aging societies? ChatGPT adoption has, in fact, been lower in senior age groups. So far.

Or is it due to privacy and security issues? But then, Italy's regulators, for instance, had revoked their ban on ChatGPT.

Or out of ethical concerns? Like using ChatGPT in education or research counts as plagiarism?

Or because they prefer human creativity? And real world interactions?

Would be tempting to prompt the tool itself. For the answer. :)

Your views? Do share them with us. In the comments below.

Until next time. :)