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Internet Growth in 2005 Sets Record

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the netcraft-confirms-this-joke-is-lame dept.

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."

9 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. what real value from this info? by yagu · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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:

    • they claim these are responses from "sites" -- what is the question/query? Is it a spider?
    • does a blog represent a single site? If so, would that mean a couple of Google machines hosting 10,000 blogs would represent 10,000 sites?
    • are load balanced sites (e.g., corporations, et. al.) represented as one site? Or are they represented by the number of machines balancing the load? (If this is true, then you can figure Google's contribution to the site count to be well over 100,000 by now.)

    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).

    1. Re:what real value from this info? by joranbelar · · Score: 3, Interesting
      If this is true, it means there is a site for approximately one site per every 350 people on the planet!

      Correction, it means we have added one site per 350 people this year. In total, we have about 12 websites for every person on the planet.

  2. And the graphs show MS is missing out by 00_NOP · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

  3. But what happened to .info? by titaniam · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

  4. What's a site? by Jugalator · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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!
  5. No duh? by Pudusplat · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  6. % of temp domains for spammers by G4from128k · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I'd wager that a goodly number of the "active domains" are the random letter/word domains created by spammers to evade filters and blacklists. Because the cost of adding another domain is nearly $0, the statistic doesn't reflect as much new content creation as it might seem. Add to that the addition of new TLDs (and peopel buying their domain in multiple TLDs) and the practice of search sites slurping expiring domains to get traffic, and I wonder how much new content lies behind the increase number of "active domains".

    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.
  7. spiders.txt? by nugas · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'd like to know--how many spiders.txt files do you have to ignore to come up with numbers like this?

  8. The local business idea makes sense by iabervon · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.