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."

Comments

Sites or hostnames?

[Anonymous Coward]

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 does Netcraft define "site"?

[securitas]

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:

• Speculation in the market for domain names, buoyed by rising resale prices and the ability to generate revenue via pay-per-click advertising on parked domains.
• Strong sales of online advertising, especially keyword-based contextual ads that support business models for both domain parking and commercial weblogs.

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.