Internet Growth in 2005 Sets Record 108
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."
what real value from this info? (Score:5, 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:
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).
And the graphs show MS is missing out (Score:4, Interesting)
But apache is winning big style - I wonder how many of those apache boxes are being hosted on Linux or BSD?
But what happened to .info? (Score:5, Interesting)
What's a site? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
No duh? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
% of temp domains for spammers (Score:5, Interesting)
It would be interesting to analyze the number of domains per unique content set.
spiders.txt? (Score:2, Interesting)
The local business idea makes sense (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:what real value from this info? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.