Hello, everyone, long time no see (no post?), I'm here to answer man's greatest question. How long do indie sites last? I half want to write 4.5 paragraphs of satire about this, but unfortunately this article will already be stupidly long.

Now, in order to figure this out I've assembled a rudimentary and extremely flawed data collection system. I've collected the date of creation, the date last updated, and the difference between the two of 35 sites each from the first and fifth page of Nekoweb and Neocities. In order to further organize the results, I've elected to divide the sites two categories, dead, and alive. 'dead' sites are those which haven't been updated in 30 days or more, but it's mostly just so that I can see the results of solely active sites for certain categories.

data type shit [I] #

My first dataset is comprised of 35 sites from the front page of Nekoweb's most followed section. The overwhelming majority of sites fit the 'alive' classification, and the average interval between creation and last update was 156.2 days. To put it simply, the average site age on the front page was 156.2, bam, article done, go home.

I do want to iterate on this further, though, if we solely included 'dead' sites for the average, then the average interval value is 115 days. This suggests that younger sites are significantly more likely to be abandoned than older sites, which does make sense.

On the opposite side, if we solely include 'alive' sites, then the average interval is 158.03 days. I'm not surprised that there's not much of a difference, given that only five of the 35 sites sampled on this page fell into the 'dead' category.

data type shit [II] #

You get the gist now, this dataset is from 35 sites on the 5th page of Nekoweb's most followed section. The average interval comes in much lower here, at 88.43 days. It's a fairly equal split between 'dead' and 'alive' sites here, with 16 of the 35 sites being classified as 'dead'.

Looking just at the 'dead' sites, we get an average creation/update interval of 55.72 days, a pretty marked difference from the composite average.

Now, it's only fair if we do it for both, the average for the 'alive' sites is 119.35 days.

I suspect the reason there's such a big difference between the two categories here is because page 5 is comprised of a pretty equal split of people that experimented with web-design and gave up on it, and people who are still climbing their way up the ranks.

Total Nekoweb Destruction (and data) #

Now for the part none of you were waiting for, the composite data for Nekoweb. If we combine all 70 of the data points for Nekoweb, then we get an average interval from creation to most recently updated of 122.31 days. I'll go further into this when I'm comparing it with Neocities composite data, so keep it in mind for then.

If we just look at the 'dead' sites for both pages, then we get an average of 85.36 days, which is honestly higher than I expected, people sure sink a lot of time into their sites before they give up on them.

Conversely, the average for 'alive' sites is 138.69 days. This is quite a bit higher than the amount for 'dead' sites, and I suppose this could mean there's a bit of a sunk cost phallacy that makes people more likely to update their site if it's older.

data for neocities nerds [I] #

Same shit, different site. Neocities kinda sucks in that if a site has gone more than 6 days without being updated, it'll just say X no. of weeks/months, rather than exact days, so some rounding was involved. Neocities also allows for users to anonymize their statistics, so of the top 35 most followed sites, I only have 31 of them, which does kinda suck, but who cares. Of these 31, the average interval was 1,742 days. This probably seems a lot higher than Nekoweb, but that's because it's an older platform, I'll put this into perspective later. Of the 31, five fell into the 'dead' category.

Just looking at the 'dead' sites, we get an average interval of 2,480 days. A rather curious development, but I suspect the number being higher than the average of both categories has to do with the age of Neocities itself.

For the 'alive' category, there's an average interval of 1,616.56 days. I don't have anything witty to say about this statistic, so onto the next.

data for neocities nerds [II] #

This one may shock you, but believe it or not, we're taking 35 sites from page five of Neocities. Nobody here seems to have secret cries from help hidden in their last updated date, so there's no anonymized info. Of the 35, four fell into the 'dead' category. The average interval of the 35 sites was 1,295.80 days.

I think I may be losing my sanity writing this each time, but nonetheless, the average interval for the 'dead' sites was 1,556.80 days, the trend established by the first page seems to be continuing here.

For the 'alive' sites, we get an average interval of 1,252.30, very close to the composite interval for this page.

Total Neocities Destruction (and data) #

So close, yet so far, the final section for Neocities, the composite data for the first and firth pages of the most following section. When combined, we get an average interval of 1,505.38 days, which honestly means nothing until I make it a percentage along with the Nekoweb one.

The Neocities composite interval for 'dead' sites is 2018.4 days. I'm honestly kinda shocked at how much higher the interval is for inactive sites, but as I said earlier, Neocities is old AF.

The computation gerbils manufactured by coorporate America tell me that the Neocities composite interval for 'alive' sites is 1434.43, continuing the Neocities trend of being lower than the 'dead' statistic, but pretty close to the average.

Pre-Conclusiion Preface #

Before I get to the totals, I'd like to highlight my standards for the conclusion. Neocities is a lot older than Nekoweb, and as such, it naturally has higher numbers. I've decided to "fix" this by making the numbers percentages relative to the age of the platforms. Neocities came out 4102 days ago, so I'll be posting percentages for Neocities relative to that. Nekoweb came out 209 days ago, so you can guess what I'll be doing with that.

Front Page Composite #

The composite for the first page samples of of Neocities and Nekoweb combined is a interval of 949.1 days between being created and last updated, but this honestly means nothing, so I'll calculate it as a percentage using the aforementioned standards. As a percentage, we get an average of 58.6% (0.585897765). This means that the average (front page) site existed for 58.6% of it's host's existence between being created and it's last update.

Isolating this just to 'dead' sites (sites not updated within the past 30 days, as of 9/20/24), we get an average interval of 1297.5 days, and as a percentage, 57.7% (0.57741118231508). This does mean that your average front page 'dead' has a lower interval than the front page composite, but honestly, the difference is negligible. In other words, sites on the front page were built up for awhile before being abandoned (i mean duh, they're on the front page)

Now, for sites that weren't curbstomped, we get an average interval of 887.295, or 57.5% (0.57741118231508). This statistic does ring as less accurate than the previous though, as Neocities had an average of 39% whereas Nekoweb had an average of 76%, which I honestly think can be attributed to platform differences.

Fifth Page Composite #

For the fifth page samples of both platforms, we get an average interval of 1,384.23, or 36.9% ( 0.36950236668307) using the aforementioned formula. This isn't exactly surprising, it makes sense that less popular sites will have existed for less time.

Looking just at the 'dead' sites, we get an average interval of 838.075, or 47.5% ( 0.47528740793964). This is another section where the percentage isn't completely accurate, though, as Neocities comes in at 38% and Nekoweb comes in at 57%, this can also likely be recognized as due to the age difference of the platforms.

Onto the 'alive' sites, for the second-to-last time, there's an average interval of 685.825, or 46.4% (0.46408338002819). Although, this is once again one with a pretty large difference, with Neocities at 33% and Nekoweb at 59%.

Total Composite (THE ACTUAL RESULTS) #

Combining the first and fifth page composites we get 1,166.665 days, or 47.7% (0.477700065841535). This means that the average website will have had a time equal to 47.7% of it's webhost's existence (as of 9/20/24) from it's creation to it's last update. This doesn't really mean much though, as it includes both active (alive) and inactive (dead) sites.

Now, this is it, this is what I was actually looking for, how long it takes for a site to die. Combining the composite dead site values of the front and fifth pages, we get 1,067.7875 days, or 52.6% (0.52634929512736). This means that, generally speaking, if a site's lifespan will come to an end, it'll take 109.934 days on Nekoweb, or 2,157.652 days on Neocities, using 52.6% as our multiplier. Before or after this point, your site will (statistically) likely be active.

For 'alive' sites, when the values are combined, we get 786.56 days, or 52% (0.520747281171635). You'll notice that this percentage is only slightly below the dead composite, and I do think there's a reason for this. Sites seem to only remain active for a finite time, but they peak directly before they inevitable burn out.

Conclusions #

I've been writing this for like 2 hours now, I don't even know what I'm doing at this point, but here we are. The big takeaways are that sites are most likely to go inactive the longer they exist for, and that the average Neocities site has an interval between creation and being updated last of 1,505.38, whereas the average Nekoweb site has an interval of 122.31 days. The composite sections percentages present the data in the easiest to understand way, but to be honest, this is still a pretty stupid way to explain it, I don't have much experience with this stuff.

If you want to look through the data yourself, here's a link to the spreadsheet, knock yourself out:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SubkFjKPfKhwM7ocOEgQC7heT2cQFvUOmRzdcrqzj3Y/edit?usp=sharing

I'm never doing this shit again, and I have no idea what I got out of this. TM out.

tl;dr: popular websites last for awhile