Growth of Small Business and Domain Names

November 17, 2011 | By John Lyotier

Someone asked me about the stats quoted in our “Look Left: AllICanAffordIsThisShittyDomain” video (click here to watch). The stats used were:

Stat #1 — “6.7 Million Small Businesses Started Last Year”

The question was phrased in the manner that this number is much higher than the oft quoted SBA number of 627,200 new employer firms, as reported by DomainSherpa here (and others).

Our stats were from the Kauffman Foundation and the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity (2010). “In 2010, 565,000 new businesses were started per month by new and repeat entrepreneurs, the same rate as in 2009. The 340 out of 100,000 adults who started businesses each month during 2010 represents a 4 percent increase over 2008.”

There is a lot of great information in that data set, including:

Entrepreneurship rates by race show that Latinos experienced the largest entrepreneurial activity increase between 2009 and 2010. The Latino business-creation rate rose from 0.46 percent in 2009 to 0.56 percent in 2010, the highest rate over the 15 years of Index data. The Asian entrepreneurial activity rate increased from 0.31 percent in 2009 to 0.37 percent in 2010, also the highest rate in the past decade and a half. Both African-Americans and non-Latino whites, on the other hand, experienced declines in entrepreneurial activity rates.

Entrepreneurship growth was highest among 35- to 44-year-olds, rising from 0.35 in 2008 to 0.40 in 2009. The oldest age group in the study (55–64 years) also experienced a large increase in business-creation rates from 2008 to 2009, contributing to a two-year upward trend to 0.40.

Stat #2 — “215 Million Website Addresses are Registered Around the World Right Now”

This stat came from the Verisign Domain Name Industry Report from August 2011.

The second quarter of 2011 closed with a base of more than 215 million domain name registrations across all Top Level Domains (TLDs), an increase of 5.2 million domain names, or 2.5 percent over the first quarter. registrations have grown by more than 16.9 million, or 8.6 percent, since the second quarter of 2010.

As with the Kauffman dataset, the Verisign report is full of interesting facts. The one that jumped to me is that one third of all .com or .net domains presently resolve as either a parked page, a 1-page under construction site, or don’t resolve at all. It is no wonder then that small businesses can’t find a domain name around which to build their business.

Verisign Domain Name Report (Aug 2011)