Does Web Growth Blow Your Mind?

From Anthony (Tony) Tjan is CEO and founder of Cue Ball, writes :5 Mind Blowing Web Stats:

Total Sites Across All Domains August 1995 — October 2009:

Mind-Blowing Web Stat #1: 40,000-fold increase in the number of websites in 15 short years. If the number of approximately 5000 websites in 1994 is correct and that we are now part of some 200 million plus websites today, then we’ve experienced a stunning 40,000-fold increase in number of websites. How’s that for a growth rate? It also helps explain why Kevin Ham, a Canadian Internet entrepreneur, is minting money from the domain names he owns. Mr. Ham owns some 100,000 domain names worth hundreds of millions and that generate estimated ad revenue of $70 million annually. Great foresight, on Ham’s part, to see that good domain names are like scarce waterfront property. This is the chart copied from Netcraft:

Mind-Blowing Web Stat #2: It feels like it was only yesterday that Evan Williams coined the term, “blogger” as founder of Blogger.com before taking the head post at Twitter. Today, the blogosphere is doubling between once and twice a year and there are over one million blog posts daily.

Mind-Blowing Web Stat #3: Speaking of Evan and Twitter, there have now been more than five billion tweets. I admit it: I was a pretty big Twitter skeptic, but now I’m a pretty big Twitter fan. My guess is that Mr. Ham and others are trying to find ways to squat on as many Twitter handles as possible as it will become increasingly difficult to get the twitter alias you want. I stumbled across this “gigatweet” counter on the web. I don’t know the accuracy of the source but this is a pretty cool real-time counter of the numbers of tweets — it is worth clicking through.

Mind-Blowing Web Stat #4: Not to leave out some of the other obvious big web names of our day, here are two stunning stats on Google and Facebook. Google still owns the search market. Sources estimate that the search goliath receives about two billion queries per day. That said, I think I’m more impressed by InsideFacebook.com’s estimates that the social network is adding 700,000 new users per day.

Mind-Blowing Web Stat # 5: Okay, this is as much of a predictive statement as a stat. For some time, I have periodically checked which sites are in the top ten, as task made much easier now with the likes of Alexa. What is amazing is that whether you look at the global top ten or US top ten websites, about half of the sites are five- to six-year-old companies (e.g. YouTube, Blogger, and Facebook). The implication is that we’ll continue to see a pretty high-rate of churn amongst the top ten. What other industry do you know where so many in the top ten market share positions are companies that are younger than a first grader? Big names that may be top of the world today are being bombarded by the threat of new Internet start-ups every day. Twitter was born in 2006 and has already hit #13 on Alexa’s top global list and #12 on its U.S. list. How long will it take to break into the top ten? The answer: not long at all. And this is what continues to make life interesting in the world wide web of disruptive change and unpredictable innovation.

Now consider this data and put it into perspective. The web has just begun and the advent of social technology will accelerate growth exponentially.  Are you behind or ahead of why the web is growing?

What say you?

Tagged as: blog marketing, brand marketing, business disruption, business relations, business transformation, Conversational Currency, conversational marketing, innovation economy, jay deragon, social capital, Social Media, social media roi, social technology