Innovation Blog

220 million websites… and growing!

By Shlomo Maital

 Total Number of Websites, and Total No. of ACTIVE websites,  1995-2009   (source:  NETCRAFT)

  In a recent interview on the BBC World Service,  Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz vigorously defended her company, which is still #2 in the world in search.  Yahoo has struggled, after Microsoft tried and failed to acquire it, then reached a collaborative agreement with Yahoo to work together. 

  In the interview, she mentioned this fact:

             There are 220 million websites in the world.

(Netcraft says the number, as of 2009, is 185,497,213, of which some 75,200,000 (or about 40 percent)  are active.)

This is staggering.  It means that there is one website for every 30 persons in the world.  Since each website contains multiple pages, there are probably far more web pages in the world than there are people.  One estimate shows there are 11 billion web pages in existence,  over 50 % more than the world population of 6,817,700,000.

   In teaching creativity to MBA students, I often find they have serious misunderstandings about the Web.  In developing creative business ideas,

  *   They underestimate how crowded the field is — another website?  The 220,000,001th website?  

  *  They misunderstand how the Web acts to commoditize — enabling people to search for low prices all over the world.

  *   They fail to grasp that the Web is not a service or a product, but an enabler, and what counts is not the enabler but the quality of the service and the experience that is enabled.   

  * They misunderstand that in Web-based business, it is often winner-take-all — people will choose the largest network, coming in second means leaving the game.

  *  Finally, if the proposed website does not meet a real unmet need — and few new websites do — it will fail.

      Start not with the Web.  Start with the need.  And think hard about whether the Web is the best enabler. Often it is not.  Often traditional localized enablers are best.  The Web often is the problem, not the solution.