This CNN report says that according to Netcraft, there are now 100 million web sites:
There were just 18,000 Web sites when Netcraft, based in Bath, England,
began keeping track in August of 1995. It took until May of 2004 to
reach the 50 million milestone; then only 30 more months to hit 100
million, late in the month of October 2006.
This calls for a graph! Here's one from Netcraft, which shows both hostnames and “active” sites, from August 1995 to the present day:
That's a lot of pictures of kittens and porn.
Netcraft lists these previous milestones:
- April 1997: 1 million
sites - February 2000: 10 million sites
- September 2000: 20 million sites
- July
2001: 30 million sites - April 2003: 40 million sites
- May 2004: 50 million sites
- March 2005: 60 million sites
- August 2005: 70 million sites
- April 2006: 80
million sites - August 2006: 90 million sites
Greg Sterling offers his thoughts on this latest milestone:
This all means that there’s more and more noise online and it’s only
getting “worse.” I’ve been talking about that in the limited context of
local. But the general cacophony of new and me-too sites and services
only means that brands and habitual behavior become more powerful;
people will fall back on what they like, know and trust rather than try
new things.The idea that “our competition is only a click away” only really
means something if you’re a no-name site. It’s very different if you’re
Google or Yahoo (or even MySpace now).People talk about “the Internet” in the same way they discuss “the
small business market.” There is no “small business market,” there are
only 10 or 14 or 17 or 20 million small businesses, with some shared
characteristics. Similarly, “the Internet” is not a monolith, but 100
million websites.Thus those would would “aggregate the tail” (whether eyeballs,
publishers/site or marketers) are thus increasingly important to the
online ecosystem.