Website Statistics in Canada

Canada is one of the most connected nations in the world with only a small percentage of the population not yet online. For people working in digital media or marketing, it can be useful to know which websites are the most popular among Canadians.

In this article, we focus on website statistics in Canada, including the websites that are getting the most monthly visitors and how much time Canadians spend online. We have also included key statistics for the most visited websites in the world.

Website Statistics for Canadians

• Canada’s internet penetration rate is 93.8%.
• Canadians spend 6.5 hours per day online.
• com is the most visited website in Canada; it had 955 million monthly visits in November 2021.
• Based on global rankings, Google is the most visited website in the world, followed by YouTube.
• Globally, Google’s search engine processes around 99,000 searches per second.
• Facebook has almost three billion users across the world and 29.44 million in Canada.
• In total, YouTube’s global audience spends one billion hours per day watching five billion videos.
• Reddit has 52 million global daily users and is the third most visited website in Canada according to Semrush.
• Canadapost, the fourth most popular website according to Similarweb, had 4.5 million visits in February 2023.

Canada is One of the Most Connected Countries in the World

As of January 2023, Canada had an internet penetration of 93.8% and 36.23 million internet users. In the same month, 33.1 million Canadians used social media, representing 85.7% of the country’s total population. In addition, there were 38.04 active mobile phone connections in Canada, which means 98.5% of the population had a mobile phone connection.

Internet use in Canada increased by approximately 529,000, which equates to a 1.5% rise from 2022 to 2023. This means that by the end of 2022, only 6.2%, or 2.39 million Canadians were not online.

Canadians Spend Over Six Hours Per Day Online

In the last quarter of 2021, Canadians spent on average 6.5 hours online every day. This includes accessing TV and streaming videos while checking, reading, and writing emails was the most regularly performed online activity. Nearly 85% of online Canadians use their internet access to check their emails. The second most popular activity is online banking followed by social media.

The Most Popular Websites in Canada

Data from Statista compiled in November 2021 shows that Google was by far the most popular website in Canada. Google.com received 955 million monthly visits and Google.ca, the sixth most popular website, received 138 million visits totalling over a billion visits in a month for the internet giant.

The next most popular website was Facebook, with 282 million monthly visits and the third was YouTube, with 270 million. However, they represent less than a third of what Google.com alone received at the same time. The top five websites also include Bit.Ly and Wikipedia with 170 million and 155 million, respectively. Interestingly, Amazon only comes in as number seven with 113 million monthly visits.

However, the order is looking quite different based on the number of visits in February 2023, according to Semrush. Based on their data, Google and YouTube are the top two websites with both clocking over 2 billion monthly visits. Reddit is third with 310 million and Facebook is only fourth with 290 million monthly visits. Asurascans comes in at number five.

Similarweb has a different order still. Their ranking still has Google at the top and YouTube second. Facebook comes in third place. In fourth place is Canadapost and Google.ca completes the top five.

The Most Visited Websites Worldwide

When looking at the global picture of the most popular websites, there are some differences compared to the rankings in Canada.

Globally, Google is still firmly in the number one spot with 88.4 billion monthly visits in November 2022 according to Statista. The second most popular is YouTube, owned by Google, with 74.8 billion visits. Facebook comes third with 10.7 billion monthly visits, leaving it far behind the top two sites.

Why do the Rankings Differ?

There are various reasons why the rankings may be different according to different sources. The first reason is the time the data was recorded. For example, the data from Statista is older and Facebook’s popularity has waned slightly in the last few years.

Another reason is the way the data is recorded. For example, some may record unique visits, while other sources may base their rankings on page views. However, despite the differences, there is no denying Google’s dominant position both in Canada and worldwide.

Google Statistics

Google, which was launched in September 1998, is not only the most visited website in Canada but in the world. Every month, the website gets 89.3 billion visits. It dominates the search engine market with a 91.9% share of the market based on records from January 2022. Bing, the next most popular search engine, only had a 2.88% market share, and Yahoo! had 1.51%.

On average, the Google search engine processes more than 99,000 searches per second. This equals over 8.5 billion searches per day. A huge increase from 10,000 searches per day when it first launched in 1998.

In 2022, the most searched keyword on Google was “Wordle”, with “India vs England” and “Ukraine” coming second and third. Johnny Depp was the most searched person and Euphoria was the most searched TV show. 84% of people use Google three or more times per day.

Google is an important tool for marketers as 46% of all online product searches start on Google, with Amazon having the edge at 54%. However, the positions of Google and Amazon for product searches switch regularly.

If you want to get noticed on Google, you need to aim to get your website, product, or blog on the first page. Only 0.63% of people using Google will click to see the results on the second page.

YouTube Statistics

The video streaming service was launched in February 2005 and in 2006 it was sold to Google for $1.65 billion. Today, YouTube is available in 80 different languages and 100 countries have localised versions of the website. It is estimated that 95% of the world’s population watches content on YouTube.

On average, YouTube’s global audience spends 1 billion hours watching around 5 billion videos per day. The average time visitors spend on YouTube per day is 14 minutes and 21 seconds. However, the average mobile viewing session is over 40 minutes.

Globally, men are slightly more likely to watch YouTube than women, with 53.9% of the global audience identifying as male. The biggest user age group is 25-34-year-olds, representing 20.7% of the total audience. The next biggest group is the 35-44-year-olds who make up 16.7% of the global audience.

With 467 million active monthly users, India has the largest YouTube user population. The United States comes next with 246 million people using YouTube and the third is Brazil with 142 million users.

However, if you look at YouTube penetration across the world, the order changes completely. The penetration rate is the highest in the UAE, with 98.7% of the population using YouTube. The UAE is followed by the Netherlands and Norway, which have penetration rates of 92.7% and 92.1%.

Facebook Statistics

Facebook was launched in 2004. Despite only 13% of the platform’s users coming from Canada and the United States, $54.5 billion of its 116.8 billion revenue comes from these two countries.

Since the launch of the Facebook app, the social media platform has been downloaded more than five billion times. Facebook has over 20.44 million users in Canada and 2.9 billion active monthly users across the world. However, the growth of the platform has stalled since the last quarter of 2021 for the first time.

Regionally, the Asia-Pacific has the highest number of Facebook users, with over 1.3 billion users in this area compared to 264 million in the US and Canada and 407 million in Europe. The rest of the world has 959 million users.

Across the globe, Facebook is more popular with younger users. 31.6% of all Facebook users are aged between 25 and 34 years. The smallest group is the over 65s with just 4.9% of Facebook users belonging to this group.

Reddit Statistics

According to the rankings by Semrush, Reddit was the third most popular website in Canada in February 2023. The social sharing website was founded in 2005 and allows users to submit text, pictures, and links.

Other users can vote on items shared on Reddit and the best content will rise to the top and less popular content will become less visible. The website is divided into smaller communities, which number in thousands and are called subreddits.

In 2021, Reddit had a revenue of 350 million and the company was valued at $10 billion in August 2021. Reddit has had around 430 million monthly active users since 2020. Around 52 million users access the website every day.

While most of Reddits revenue comes from advertising, some of it comes from subscriptions. The website offers users the option to become premium users, which means paying a fee to go advert-free. In 2021, there were around 344,000 premium users, which generated more than 17 million in subscription revenues.

Globally, Reddit is more among men. In January 2022, 63.8% of the worldwide Reddit users identified as male. In Canada, around 59% of the users are male. The website is most popular among users aged 18 to 29.

Canada Post Statistics

Based on data from Similarweb, the fourth most visited website in Canada is Canadapost. The first Canadian post office was opened in 1753 and the uniform Canadian postal system was created in 1868.

In February 2023, the Canada Post website received 4.5 million visits, down from 6.8 million in January and 7.3 million in December 2022. On average, people looked at 1.5 pages per visit. The average visit to the website was 18 minutes and 56 seconds long.

86% of the website’s visits originated in Canada, while around 9% came from the United States and 2% from India. The majority of the visits, over 92%, to the Canada Post website were made from mobile devices.

Conclusion

Due to different data recording methods, it is not always easy to determine the exact order of the most popular websites in Canada. While different sources place different websites in places from two to ten, they are all in agreement that Google.com is the most popular website in Canada.

Google.com is also the most popular website in the world, followed by YouTube, which is also owned by Google. With over 88 billion visits to Google per month and over 74 billion to YouTube, compared to Facebook’s 10.7 billion in third place, it doesn’t look likely that any websites will be threatening Google’s domination any time soon.