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Internet Growth in 2005 Sets Record
miller60 writes "Netcraft's Web Server Survey reports that a large gain in web sites in October makes 2005 the strongest year ever for Internet growth. The web has added 17.5 million sites so far this year, eclipsing the previous annual best of 16 million during the dot-com boom in 2000. And that's with two months left in the year. Is this growth for real? Web hosts targeting the small business market (like Yahoo Small Business and Go Daddy) report that business is booming, suggesting that web-wary local businesses are finally going online. But some of the the growth is likely due to domain name business models, with speculators buying large numbers of domain and placing advertising on them."
If this is true, it means there is a site for approximately one site per every 350 people on the planet! Hmmmm, don't know if that's impressive or not. However, some criteria that would make it more clear to me what they're counting as web sites:
As in the blog universe I suspect a large number of these sites are not much in substance. Aside from my curiosity about the realness of this number I wonder what really can be gleaned from it. It is interesting to see the profile and trends of the technology serving the sites (most notably Apache vs. IIS/.NET).
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Netcraft confirms that Netcraft confirms that "Internet Growth in 2005 Sets Record"
Yes! I listen to NYC Speedcore and do math at 3AM. I suggest you try it too.
I'm glad to see the porn industry thriving. Although, even with a fair amount of time allotted to "browsing" per day, I simply don't see how I can be expected to visit all sixteen million sites.
"If you put butter and salt on it, it tastes like salty butter." -Terry Pratchet, on Popcorn.
I'm sure 99.9% of those are pr0n, sp4m, and (crap) blogs.
"You can shovel more shit on the pile, but in the end you still just have a pile of shit."
- Martin Luther, circa 1542
Of the 17.5 million new sites, 17.3 million are blogs about the sad life of a suburban middle-class teenager.
Sure they are still gaining customers - in a market expanding this quickly you have be really bad not to do that.
But apache is winning big style - I wonder how many of those apache boxes are being hosted on Linux or BSD?
...strongest year for Interweb growth.
Please stop APK.. you're only hurting yourself.
Who do you think are the ones benefiting this new internet bubble?
My bets goes to Apple, since they are the ones making best shovels this time.
I download the zone files about once per month for my surf engine, and noticed that this month the .info zone file shrank by ~30%... Is this past month the anniversary (1-5 year) of the .info TLD setup (ie bulk pre-registrations expiring)? What happened to info for the number of domains to go from 3.7M to 2.7M in one month?
It's cancer! Kill it with radiation!!! Let's hope it ain't testicular.
read the bunni comic
So 17.5 million - 12.8 viagra webs = 5.3 million
Texas Hold'em up: 3,720,000
5.3 million - 3.7 Texas hold'em up = 1.6 million.
So may be there are a lot of new webs, but if there are spam who cares?
My city: Barcelona.
I did start 2 blogs...that's 2 more blogs than I did back in 2000 so there may be some merit.
http://www.watacrackaz.com
The price of domains has gotten so low, that it's not all that surprising that this is the case. I think godaddy's got domains at just $2 now. I think it was something like $8 just 2 years ago.
If each blog is a "site", then that could explain a bit, considering that huge internet trend probably booming this year.
If not, and it's e.g. a domain name, I personally find this a bit surprising. I thought the growth rate would decline a bit, and even recalling seeing such predictions just a few years ago.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I better get out there and register LeftHandedElvisImpersonator.com before someone else does!!!!!!!
"As far as I'm concerned, I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue." ~A. Einstein
It only makes sense that the amount of sites right now is growing exponetially. Every year more people are connected to the web, more people spend more time on the web, and more money is derived from and therefore pumped into the web.
Most human driven growth, in almost any field (print, television, power generation, population sizes) tneds to be exponential, driven by the population increase and the parallel growth of technology and information management.
"If you put butter and salt on it, it tastes like salty butter." -Terry Pratchet, on Popcorn.
17.4 million of them are on Cogent, so we can't get to them.
It would be interesting to analyze the number of domains per unique content set.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
The pornography industry has posted record gains for the 10th straight year in a row.
One analyst commented "The price of stocks are swelling rapidly. It's a wonder the engorged industry hasn't peaked. I've been waiting for things to deflate, but they just keep rising, straight as an arrow."
"There are more important things than stopping terrorism. Upholding the Constitution is one of them." - Ars Forumer.
But some of the the growth is likely due to domain name business models, with speculators buying large numbers of domain and placing advertising on them."
Please sign petition to restore sanity to our banking system!!!
http://financialpetition.org/
It's great that we're seeing continued internet growth, but one thing that the article failed to mention was that the quality of the internet sites was also on the rise in 2005.
For example, behold the recently created website for the Flock browser.
Brace yourselves and be prepared to witness true innovation.
http://www.flock.com/
Go Daddy spends its profits from your fees backing American torture.
--
make install -not war
Is there a count of actual domain names somewhere?
Xanga and Pre-teen crisis.
I'd like to know--how many spiders.txt files do you have to ignore to come up with numbers like this?
Of the 17.5 million new sites, 17.3 million are blogs about the sad life of a suburban middle-class teenager.
Don't you mean Dupes?
"If all the world's a stage, I want to operate the trap door." - Paul Beatty
The sites that prey on spelling mistakes and the like are just annoying ...
Learn from my mistake, Dick's Sporting Goods is not dicks.com
Sorry to bleed over topics...
A few assumptions:
- As web hosts increase, so does the number of emails to/from those hosts.
- As P2P, gaming, instant messaging increase, so would the number of hosts about those activities. A good example is bittorrent. As more people use BT, more sites about BT are created.
Based on those 2 assumptions, WWW is a good indicator of the Internet as a whole.
That said, these studies are always a bunch of BS and don't really reflect anything useful.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
Wait until the UN takes over!!
Tyranny isn't the worst enemy of a democracy. Cynicism is.
i guess we will have more than one site each one day. pushing ...
Of course it sets a new record.
More people == More need for computers
Cheaper computers (along with internet) == More people with computers.
Probably a whole bunch of other equalities you can put in here. Fill in the blanks. The internet will grow.
ogg
Black cat, searing pain, flames...? I must be in Heaven! - Homer Simpson
You are right of course... I was just nitpicking on the article text. Although I might argue that WWW isn't necessarily a 'good' indicator.... especially (as others have pointed out) if the 'growth' is attributed mostly to blogs, and viagra ;)
Please stop APK.. you're only hurting yourself.
I'm just glad that I haven't heard about Natalie Portman and hot grits for a while...
I think the main factor is likely to be that people are coming to expect that the little restaurant down the street will have their hours and phone number up on the web, and getting someone to put up a site with this info and enough matching design elements that people will know they're in the right place is becoming easy enough that people are doing it.
I've certainly noticed an increase in my ability to find purely informational web sites owned by and about small brick-and-morter businesses, and it makes sense, as more people start to prefer the web over the phone, that this would give an advantage in terms of customers tending to show up when the business is open and feeling confident when leaving the house that the business will be open.
By spam, I mean those pages set up just to catch Google searches, that have nothing to do with your search but just happen to have your exact search terms in their URL, for example.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
Part of this "growth" is from outsourcing (ie jetblue pays retired old folks a 40k+ to answer calls). Another part is from other contries (asia,india,russia) deciding they can do a much better job of democracy and capitalism than we can (According to friedmen's The World is flat) they might be right being as that so far american business wines and moans about the 'cost' of workers and paying them enought to make rent/morgage/bills/food and btw drive to work an 5 am to open at 6 and leave at 1600 . Where as some asian companies (studio ghibli for instance) likes having a smaller core of decently paid workers that are content -and they consquencly use the internet bigtime to colaberate with partners, manufacturing firms etc.
Well with the rate the spammer/scammer/moronic address staker ads companies,
I AM NOT SURPRISE AT ALL.
Nearly all the even-moderately popular sites have their pseudo-address-name ad sites.
. . . Inter-what?
The internet really is growing at an exponential rate! All those bad conference papers were true...
Remember, Gore did not invent the internet.
He just "took the initiative in creating the the internet."
Netcraft is inaccurate as all get out. When things fall off the list, they don't come back no matter what you do. When things get on the list, the don't necessarily fall off the list. Basically it's an unpredictable service that only caters to the largest of hosting companies and ignores all of the rest with extreme prejudice.
With that in mind, I place such small stock in ANYTHING that netcraft says. How can I do otherwise when sites that have been hosted by me for years never show up on netcraft, and sites that died 6 years ago are still showing up as hosted by me.
It may be because of jerks like me: Domain names are so cheap that sometimes I register things like williamshatnerrules.com for no reason except that the domain is funny. One day I might put some content at all the domains I have.
Did I mention that I own williamshatnerrules.com? 'Cause I own williamshatnerrules.com!
I remember a few years ago reports that the number of websites were declining (around the time of the dotcom crash). Can this new record upsurge in webpages be the result of the new popularity of blogging?
Logic, macros, and more
Oh come on mods, I thought the previous was funny! You got a hard on for using that troll mod? It must be penis envy... Don't be a dick!
damn bloggers !!!1!1
How would they know? What if it shrinks radically in the last quarter?
Are we talking about web SITES or web PAGES? A web site is a collection of pages, after all. It's hard for me to swallow that that many SITES were created in the past ten months. Pages, sure. I create a page when I add something to my blog. I don't add a site, though.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
I wonder how many of these sites have more than porn or warez on them...? Or how many of these hostnames are set up for nasty purposes?
===
There'd be something worth knowing... so I could shudder in fear every night for the rest of my life.
(or shudder with the anticipation of warez...? )
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
...and 75% of those web sites are "worthless" blogs full of people's crap about their mundane lives.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
Wake me up when September ends
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
In case they're counting the domain names only:
Might this growth have anything to do with Yahoo offering domain names for $2 (or more recently for $3)?
just my $0.02
A significant part of the growth must surely be due to the scrape sites: websites created purely to gain Ad Sense revenues which are created on single topics and then scrape content from other sites. They're seriously compromising Google's search results because the only way to distinguish their content from original stuff is for it to be reviewed by a human. Google is going to have to employ lots of human site reviewers so these sites can be downgraded in the results.
The "Earth" has already added nearly 100,000,000 "people" in 2005.
1) Your analysis is based on bad assumptions so your result is way off. 2) You're a sick bastard for fucking a horse.
I am not sure whether the increase in domain names reflects real activity on the Internet. For example, I recently received a spam email from some guys claiming to be the official registrar for the .ws domain names. They had this cool video that presented a very compelling argument why I should reserve the nikolaypavlov.ws domain. The argument went like this:
"Nikolay, think how you would feel if someone else owned your name! Take it before it is gone!"
I did not pay them a cent, because I hate spam, but I did call my buddy who runs a hosting business and how I am the happy owner of http://www.nikolaypavlov.com/
And, now that I own it, it just sits there and gathers dust...
This unfortunately counts all the spam domains with ultra-long names like cletus.spears.happysearchspam.wizzleteats.net that all point to the same stupid server. It's not uncommon for true garbage servers to have hundreds if not thousands of domains pointed to the same machine, with funky scripting that adapts the content to the domain name AND the search terms (from the http Referer).
Of those 17.5 million sites, how many actually have valid content on them ? Probably less than half a million, and I'm just pulling that number out of my nether region.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I tell you, the Internet is where the money will come from. You'll be rich. Invest my friends!