Number of WWW.ebsites
from Summer 2000
By the end of May, the world had more than 15 million active websites. As the chart shows, a big spurt came early last year, when the number of registrations for new sites hit 23,600 per day. This rate more than tripled in March, with the arrival of some 750,000 new names over a 10-day period, according to Mike Prettejohn of Netcraft, the British e-consult-ing firm that compiled the numbers.
This extraordinary growth reflects not only the insatiable demand for corporate websites, but the opening up of the registration process in early 1999. The Net`s new governing body-the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which is based Marina del Rey, California-ended the monopoly on dot-name registration that Network Solutions had enjoyed since www`s birth 10 years ago. Now more than 100 companies are allowed to register Web names. Meanwhile, the cost of registering a name has dropped, from $35 to $25 a year.
