There are now 1.71 billion websites, but most of them are zombies

Considering that the World Wide Web, as we old-timers used to call it, started with about 10 websites back in 1992, it's fair to say the web has seen explosive growth.

According to data from Internet Live Stats, quantified here in a chart by our partners at Statista, as of August 19, 2019 at exactly 10:22 Central European Time, there were 1.71 billion (yes, with a B) websites in existence. That's well up even from the 2.4 million sites around in 1998, or the 17.1 million in the year 2000 (which we old-timers once called Y2K).

For this survey, the definition of "website" is a uniquely named site that can be resolved into an IP address using a name server on the internet.

The first time the web hit one billions sites was September, 2014, only five years ago. Then it dropped and went back up again by 2016. Note the ups and downs. Drops also happened after 2009 and 2012. Hard to say why. The latest dip was in 2017 to 2018—the prior year had a total number of sites listed of 1.76 billion already, giving 2017 the record year, even ahead of the current number by about 50 million sites.

We noted the launch of some big-name web properties, such ad Yahoo's launch in '94—back when indexing the web could actually be done on hand-coded HTML pages, before we even really knew what a "search engine" was. Google's arrival in 1998 fixed that. That was only 21 years ago—Google is barely old enough to legally drink, let alone try and control the world. Facebook (launched in 2004) is just a teenager.

Visit Live Stats directly and they put it in perspective. Despite the billions of sites, only around 200 million are actually active. The rest are mainly parked, abandoned domain names. Rest in peace, 99.94 percent of the web.