>>>In an annual survey by Simmons it was found that 54% of U.S.
>>>businesses have Web sites, a growth from last year's findings
>>>of 39% (http://www.eretail.net/1998/news/06/24/980624d.htm)
>>
>>
Andreas wrote...
>>There are 13 million registered businesses in the USA. The Simmons study
>>would mean that there are over 7 million business sites. This is not the
>>case, therefore the study is wrong.
>I'm curious as to how one goes about de terming the number of business
>sites. How do you count them accurately?
>
>Andreas, how many business sites of American companies do you think there
are?
The ICC (Interstate Commerce Commission) keeps a count of the total number
of registered businesses (business licence, corporations, etc.) Thus there
are 13 million or so. Remember: this includes pushcart hotdog stands, tiny
gas stations in rural Georgia, backyard lawnmower repair shops, etc. Most
businesses are very small and barely make any money.
As for the web, in late 97, I wrote a white paper for a web company's
board of directors. The largest count I could find was 550,000 unique
commercial web sites. The .com extension isn't accurate; many organizations,
etc. use the .com extension. Hollywood creates a new .com for each movie,
all made by the same company. There are about 3 million domain names;
many of those are personal, government, military, organizations, or
educational. Therefore the count of 1/2 million is probably about right. One
million commercial sites would mean that 1/3 of all domain names are
companies, and again, that's too high (there are the other categories: gov,
mil, edu, etc.)
Furthermore, a business website means generally a web master. There
certainly
aren't 7 million web masters in the USA. It would be the single largest
profession in the USA (the American workforce is 95 million people.) Now,
many sites are run by secretaries using FrontPage and other end-user tools.
I doubt there are more than 100,000 web masters in the USA (I'd guess it's
somewhere around 25-30,000 for paid, titled web masters). That's about right
for a count of about 1/2 million business sites (many of us maintain
multiple sites.)
One conclusion that one may draw is that there is a bright and glorious sun
rising for us. Eventually, there will be millions of companies on the web
(there
are maybe 25 million companies worldwide), thus there will be a huge demand
for web dudes and dudettes.
___________________________________________________
Andreas Ramos [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.andreas.com
____________________________________________________________________
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