This month the dWeb team has crunched some numbers on the actual sites on the decentralized web. The results are surprising and maybe a little disappointing - there aren't yet the tens of thousands of decentralized sites claimed by some reports. However you might be interested to know that the number of sites on the current internet (Web 2.0) grew from 1000 to 30,000 in the four years from 1983 to 1987 when the Arpanet switched over to TCP/IP. The decentralized web is growing faster than its predecessor, and proponents are coming up with more and more ways to use the dWeb. The future of the internet is here.
Last month the dWeb team uploaded another two hundred live dWeb sites into our database, making the total 486. But some platforms are suggesting that there are tens of thousands of sites on the decentralized web already. So why the discrepancy? We trawled through these to find out.
Of the 12,136 domains we checked, the vast majority of those are listed as 'for sale'. It's likely that purchasing .crypto and .zil domains now in the hope of selling them down the track. This actually happened to .com domains more than a decade ago until domain purchasers had to prove the name was linked to their business. A bit of extortion was going on from users who, for instance, had bought www.cocacola.com and then tried to flog it to the actual company for a fortune!
Another 10% of domains are simply holding sites; coming soon pages and landing pages not yet containing any data. Just 4% of the current domains are live dWeb sites and the remainder are broken links.
Of those site, the majority at 35% are social sites including networking and bio sites. News and business sites take up a combined 29% and IT and finance are at 9% each. These categories are not set in stone, however, as some sites might be applicable to more than one category.
Of course, there are more sites going onto the dWeb every day, so our team has to work hard to stay on top of things. You can search the current live dWeb sites by category and subcategory and click through directly on the links.
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