Today Netcraft tells us there are 100 Million websites. CNN heralds it as a milestone. It strikes me more like the US hitting 300 million or the earth hitting 6 Billion. In other words, it isn't good news.

A little more color from the report:

The 100 million site milestone caps an extraordinary year in which the Internet has already added 27.4 million sites, easily topping the previous full-year growth record of 17 million from 2005. The Internet has doubled in size since May 2004, when the survey hit 50 million.

Think for a minute about 100 million websites, and the pace at which they're being created:

1. How many of these sites exist only to foster the pagerank of another site? For a long time (and still) many SEO's create 'fake' sites to increase the number of inbound links.
2. How many of these sites exist only to gain search traffic for Adwords revenue. The blog version is now called splogs, but these have existed in many forms for some time. Many are auto-generated and contribute nothing to the net, in fact they detract from it.

I'd not at all be surprised to find 25% or more of the world's sites fit into one of these two categories. Maybe a lot more. Of the rest, I'm sure far less than half are of any commercial nature, but this still leaves 30-40 million sites. Some questions about these:

• How many have no search engine optimization - the webmaster hasn't even done the basics to help the engines properly classify what they've got (let alone all those terms they would legitimately want traffic for but aren't getting).
• How many have horrible navigation and worse copy and make it really hard for the visitor to easily know what they're trying to say (or sell) and why?
• What percentage don't at least basic analytics code on them and/or have webmasters that do not look at that data AND do something because of it at least once a month?

I would easily expect the answer to each of these questions to be at least 75%. Does that sound harsh? Do you think there are 7-10 million websites which exist for a good reason, are reasonably well designed, optimized, and analyzed? Sounds optimistic to me.

On the other hand, my analysis would leave 25-35 million sites that need optimization, architectural and content improvements, and better measurement. That sounds like an opportunity.