Netcraft released their November report on the total number of active websites and the figures are breaching the 150M mark. That is an increase of almost 7M websites from the previous month.
Starting from September the average increase per month of active websites was in the 7M range. Compare that with last year’s monthly increase average of 1M which tripled in value come Q1 of 2007.
Netcraft is attributing this increase of websites to the rush of users setting up blogs and flocking to social networking sites to set up their personal pages (Windows Live Spaces, Myspace, Blogger etc.) Add to that also the domain names bought by entrepreneurs of the Domaineering Business.
With that data on hand, plus the promise of cheaper broadband access and the ever dropping hosting and bandwidth fee’s, I wouldn’t be surprised if that figure goes up even further next year. Makes you wonder how the other search engines get to cope with that amount of data that they have to sift through? Thank God for Sitemaps and the Ping function.
Makes you feel too that your own site is infinitesimally small compared to the vastness of the World Wide Web.
Update: Netcraft just released their figures for December and the total no. of active sites now stands at 155 M. Compared to last month’s growth of 7M, December only registered 5M worth of new sites. Guess the web too slows down during the Holidays.