Remember when the biggest thing on the internet was downloading a file over FTP and praying nobody picked up the phone? This animated graph tracks the evolution of internet traffic from 1994 to 2026, from bulletin boards, Usenet, and IRC chat rooms to a world dominated by TikTok videos, YouTube, Netflix, and an army of AI scraping bots.
One of the biggest surprises? In 1994, all internet traffic combined was measured in mere thousands of gigabytes per month. By 2026, short-form video alone is consuming hundreds of billions of gigabytes every month. The future arrived… and it’s mostly videos of people dancing, cats doing weird things, and robots reading the entire internet.
Watch the graph and enjoy 30 years of the internet speedrunning its own evolution.