Netcraft Jan 2009 survey shows a drop of 1M sites

According to Netcraft, their January 2009 survey showed an uncharacteristic drop of 1.23 Million active web sites. Could this be an indicator of the sad state of the world economy? Maybe. Considering that in better times Netcraft’s previous surveys always showed a healthy increase of 1M sites added per month.

Then again, it could just be Google cleaning up spam sites in its Blogger platform as they dropped 600,000 sites from their domain. That’s half of the 1.23 Million reported to be inactive already. Nice to see that Google is starting to clean up spam in their own backyard. I don’t know if they’ll allow people to re-register those blogspot subdomains again, but if they do, it would be a great opportunity for some SEO folks to snap up some sites with High Page Ranks.

What’s interesting to note is that Microsoft’s Internet Information Server has been losing market share previously earned from the Open Source Apache Web Server’s. Apache meanwhile gained a 1% or roughly 1.27 Million sites. That could be a more solid indicator of the performance of the dismal economy as companies switch to the free and open sourced Apache webserver over the paid IIS in order to save on cost.