

Planning for Another 100 Million Web Sites - drusenko
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/02/planning-for-another-100-million-web-sites/

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zemo
“There are maybe 100 million Web sites out there – that is not many, when you
consider that there are billions of people,”

considering that the vast majority of people just need a listing on an
existing network, that's a completely pointless statistic. Yeah, 100 million
websites. Ok. There's ten times as many Facebook profiles. Where do you draw
the line? Oh, all the Facebook profiles look the same so that doesn't count.
What about MySpace profiles? Does that delineate things? What about hostnames?
Does that delineate things? What about all the hosts that are just Tumblr
sites?

That 100M statistic is useless without a definition for how it's arrived at.

~~~
obviouslygreen
Particularly if we end up with Facebook, LinkedIn, and similar services
continuing to grow and provide facilities for more and more types and volumes
of institutions, in which case it may well be a lot more than just profiles on
third-party sites that are ignored by things like this. We might gain ten
sites that add 10% to the actual size of the non-porn Internet... in which
case this would be even less meaningful.

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callmevlad
Does anyone know where the 100MM number comes from?

According to Netcraft [1], there were over 600MM active sites [2] last month.

[1]
[http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/04/02/april-2013-web-...](http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/04/02/april-2013-web-
server-survey.html)

[2] <http://www.netcraft.com/active-sites/>

~~~
drusenko
The 600MM number is hostnames, the active site number is 186MM. At the end of
the day, we don't really feel like hostnames (non-active, parked) are
relevant.

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eCa
How many of the 15MM+ weebly sites are active? It seems a stretch that 15% of
all web sites are created with Weebly?

~~~
kalleboo
And how many "active" sites are just spam? When the archiveteam tried to
backup posterous, it felt like the majority of all pages were spam.

~~~
arbuge
There is a ton of spam on Weebly. We have a crowdsourced online shopping
directory and 90% of the spam comments we get seem to involve Weebly sites.
It's gotten to the point where we'll probably just write a simple spam filter
that screens for "weebly" in our submissions.

~~~
drusenko
Hey, we'd love to work with you on this. We have a full-time dedicated team
that works hard on this and we have a zero-tolerance policy.

We work very hard to keep and maintain a high-quality network, and while the
percentage spam is low across the network, even a low percentage can still be
high volume for some.

Please email me (david+c@weebly.com) and I'll put you in touch with them, we
are committed to taking a hard stance on spam.

~~~
arbuge
Just emailed you an example.

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johansch
I browsed a bunch of random weebly-made sites. They seem fairly nicely
designed.. but this jumped out:

For many of the themes used: rather than showing photos the way that has been
done since like 1994, with an <img> tag pointing to a jpeg image that is being
downloaded and progressively decoded and painted.. there's some javascript
that displays a loading spinner until the image has been fully downloaded..
then it shows the image.

It's quite annoying. The spinner attracts your attention in a bad way.

Visible e.g. here, on some of their showcase sites:

<http://www.chairigami.com/>

<http://www.theorganicgallery.com/>

~~~
drusenko
Actually, that's a slideshow, which is a feature we offer. It uses javascript.
Regular images are just good 'ol <img> tags :)

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orta
I'm glad to see that there are good places for the mum & pop shops to get
websites without having to go through working with a wed dev agency. When I
worked for one I know it would have been better for both sides if there were
tools like this so that they could just make something as small as they needed
whilst I could get on with larger projects.

~~~
everlost
I agree. It's kind of ironic that after all these efforts at making web
development easier, it's still difficult for a non-technical person to figure
out how to get a simple store online. The learning curve associated with
products like Wordpress, Magento, et al is quite high, even for a web dev like
myself. Tools like these are very much appreciated.

Disclaimer: I work with <http://www.squarespace.com>, a competitor for most of
the products above.

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JoeKM
Interesting redesign. There aren't many non-application sites that have a
fixed sidebar for its landing page. This feels a lot more professional now,
akin to squarespace.com, however I wonder if that will hurt you. The last
design felt more friendly and casual to cater to "mom & pop", which I imagine
is a very profitable niche.

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alcuadrado
"HTML5 is supposed to solve the problem of writing for different devices and
browsers, but designers have found that the standard has its own complexities"

WTF?!!!

