We have all heard x number of small businesses fold after 1 year, y number after 2 years but does anyone have any stats or noticed significant trends in terms of: How long are websites / domains usually around for? I guess we all notice the successful domains sticking around, but what proportion of websites are published and them drop off within a year or three years etc? Stats would be preferrable if anyone has some.
Hmmm...Interesting question. I think stats for this sort of thing may be hard to come by because of the nature of internet business. For example, I ran my internet business for 6-8 months before I actually got around to getting the proper licenses and what not. Which means, if I would of given up in the 1st 6-8 months, my "stats" wouldn't have counted. I would imagine that the internet business failure/success rate would be similar to any other small business failure/success rate.
Here are some interesting numbers: In the last 24 hours: 44,000 new .com domains were registered 15,000 were deleted or allowed to expire. In total, there are almost 30 million registered .coms active. And about 16 million have been deleted. Would it be fair to say that about 50% of domains registered never survive?
that doesn't reflect businesses in general though. it's quite possible that thousands of those domains were being snagged by the same person (or company). not to mention all the non-commercial dot-coms included in that.
It would be really hard to say... Like Disgust said, there are thousands of domains being bought up every day. I know of at least one company that buys upwards of 2000 domains a day then sells them on. I guess that a lot of the domains that are allowed to expire were in actual fact, never used for anything at all, although they may have been owned by someone/ some company for the duration of the registration period. This company might still be active, but allowed the domains to expire (we do it). I would love to see some real stats about internet businesses, and their lifetimes but likw VS said - that is just so difficult to judge, that until some kind of legislation for the regulation of internet business comes in to place (not that I particularly want this to happen) that we are just not going to see statistics of this kind.