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2005 Looks Like Record Year for Net Growth
miller60 writes "Netcraft reports that the Internet grew by 2.7 million sites in June, the second-largest gain in the history of its Web Server Survey. With growth of 10 million sites in the first half of the year, 2005 should easily surpass the existing annual growth record of 16 million sites from the dot-com boom year of 2000. The growth of small business web sites, blogs, domain name businesses and online advertising are all cited as factors in the strong gains."
It seems that Netcraft is reporting on newly created hostnames (I'm assuming domain names) rather than actual sites. How hard is it to point multiple domains at one site? Not very.
How many of those sites are just link farms used to pollute search engines like Google? I'm noticing more and more of these linkfarms getting high placement when searching for things. It's making searching frustrating.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
It seems that Netcraft is reporting on newly created hostnames (I'm assuming domain names) rather than actual sites. How hard is it to point multiple domains at one site? Not very.
So true. Judging by all the throw-away domain names I see in spam everyday (e.g., fqydahwviagra.scam), I wonder what percentage of the domains are real. I also wonder if some of the domain name expansion is just companies protecting themselves with alternate tradename spellings and TLDs
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
How does Netcraft define the word "site"? If it just means domains that resolve to a host, it's not very encouraging. I would like to see a breakdown of the numbers that shows how many of these sites are linkspam farms, redirects and other such junk.
My suspicion is that most of the growth comes from from such "sites". The survey notes read:
While individuals may use ad revenues to subsidize the cost of parking domains while they develop them, the new business model for advertising-filled parked domains and spam-filled "commercial weblogs" means that the amount of junk on the net will increase.
This also means that it's now even more lucrative for domain squatters to hold onto decent domains, which will increase their resources and abilities to register and squat on an even greater number of domains. After all, this is now an acceptable and viable business model that works against those who want to contribute something useful to the Internet. Squatters can now cite ad-revenue squats in arbitration cases.
This isn't a positive development.