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."

Comments

Internet? Article should read...

[max99ted]

...strongest year for Interweb growth.

But what happened to .info?

[titaniam]

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?

% of temp domains for spammers

[G4from128k]

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.