In a decade, the Internet has lost more than a third of its content

According to data from the Real Time Statistics Project, the number of online websites increased tenfold between 2008 and 2017, from 172 million to more than 1.7 billion.

• The number of users followed a similar increase beginning in the late 1990s and early 2000s in North America and Europe.
• Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia began to catch up quite late, around the 2010s.

According to a study by the Pew Research Center, an American research center, the golden age of the Internet marked by a period of mass adoption has given way to an era of “digital degradation”, which results in the disappearance 38% of web pages that existed a decade ago.

• The disappearance of websites affects individuals, businesses and governments: 21% of official pages contain at least one inaccessible link.
• On Wikipedia, more than half (54%) of references refer to pages that no longer exist.
• Social networks are also affected by this phenomenon: almost a fifth (18%) of the tweets published as part of the Pew study disappeared in just a few months.

The reasons for the disappearance of content posted online are multiple: most government sites have migrated to secure “https” addresses, have been transformed into “static” documents (like PDFs) or now redirect to a new address. For individuals, maintaining a site generates costs generally offset by traffic. When a page stops being visited, it loses the reason for its existence.