Dot com registry led the celebrations today completing 25th anniversary of the first ever .com address to be registered. The anniversary coincides with research by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), which founded that the internet economy drives more than US$1.5 trillion in global annual economic activity. Most of this revenue is derived from 11.9 million e-commerce and online business websites recorded by VeriSign�s Internet Profiling Service. A further 1.8 million sports-related sites and 4.3 million entertainment-related sites are also registered with a .com web address. The most popular words among .com URL�s include "home" (1.2 million), "online" (1 million) and "land" (891,000), according to the firm. This 25th anniversary of .com was an important milestone and a good chance to remember how the internet has changed the world. Anyone under the age of 30, they probably don�t remember when the internet wasn�t in their life. It has become such an essential part of how people work, live and play. As part of the development of the .com infrastructure, the company outlined the proceeding roadmap for 2020, promising to be able to offer capacity 1,000 times greater than it currently provides in order to handle four quadrillion queries per day. The first .com address to be registered was symbolics.com, and today there are more than 80 million .com web sites registered.
In 1998 and 1999 the ".com boom" began which saw nearly 20 million names registered in those two years. The burst of the dotcom bubble in 2000 saw registrations cool off slightly. The bubble burst in March 2000 when the NASDAQ stock market peaked at more than double its value from the previous year before. The NASDAQ lost nearly 9% in just six days triggering chain reactions from investors, funds and institutions who feared the results of the United States DOJ vs Microsoft, poor results from Internet retailers in Christmas 1999 and business spending on the Y2K bug. VeriSign reports that some of the most popular websites today were registered late into the .com era. "Youtube.com, for example, wasn't registered until 2005. Twitter.com was also registered after the .com boom," said a VeriSign spokesperson. VeriSign have setup a 25th Anniversary site for .COM to celebrate its existence.
Wow, youtube's only been around since 2005? I would have thought 8-10 years, at least! Time flies yet sites that become huge like Twitter can do it so fast that almost forget about when they were never around.
Yeah YouTube grew fast as hell. I might be a little bit off with the numbers here, but I heard it only took about 18 months from when the guys that created YouTube first had the idea for it, to when they sold it for the $1.6 billion. That's 800 million a piece in a year and a half...