Blog Services Driving Growth in Internet Hostnames

Posted on August 3, 2006

TG Daily cites a Netcraft study that found record growth in Internet hostnames during July. Netcraft says the bulk of the growth is coming from new blogs at Google and Microsoft's blogging services: Blogger.com and Windows Live Spaces.

The Internet added 4.4 million new hostnames during July - the single largest gain of new sites in a single month, according to Internet services firm Netcraft. The growth surpassed the previous records set in June of this year, which saw a 3.96 million site gain.

The main reason for the quick growth, Netcraft said, is the battle between Microsoft and Google to attract users to their blog services. Both firms contributed significantly to drive the Internet to a new record number of websites, which now stands at 92,615,362 websites. According to the firm, Microsoft added about 858,000 new sites, while Google gained about 568,000 during the month.

It looks like Microsoft is beating Google's Blogger. People might be gravitating to Windows Live Spaces, formerly MSN Spaces, for the social networking services and not the blogs. If the trend continues Google might want to consider adding more features to Blogger. Small Initiatives jokes, "And I'll bet 80 percent of them contain one 'Hello, World!' post apiece."

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