Netcraft’s 100M Sites - An Illusion Of Growth?

Netcraft’s latest survey claims that it has detected over 100 Million websites on the net. The pattern of growth has been dramatic. In April 2003 it detected 40 million sites. By May 2004 it detected 50 million. By March 2005 it detected 60 million. By August 2005 it was at 70 million. In April 2006 it was 80 million and 90 million by August 2006. The November survey puts the figure at just over 100 million. It is an amazing growth pattern but it is not a natural one.

The problem of domain tasting, where a registrar will register a domain and point it to a PPC advertising page for five days and then let the registration lapse if it does not make enough revenue is the blight of the web. Millions of domains are registered each day only to be dropped five days later. And many ICANN registrars are just clones, set up for the purpose of domain tasting. The bozos in ICANN aren’t even bothered with this pollution of the web.

Filtering out the domain noise of domain tasting is a difficult thing to do with domain statistics. Some hosters are easily identifiable and many of these websites are parked on a limited set of IPs. Removing all these PPC, “coming soon” , parked and “direct navigation network” websites from a web survey would show the web to be a lot smaller than people think. But it almost gets down to the philosophical question of what constitutes a website.
So how much of the growth is natural? It is difficult to tell. But one thing is certain - a lot of it is down to domain tasting rather than the growth of real websites.

Tags: Irishblogs,netcraft, Domains, Webhosting, Internet Statistics, Irish Webhosters, domainnames

Written by John McCormac on November 4th, 2006 with comments disabled.
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