I spent the last 2 days scraping Reddit to collect a total of 18167 unique domains of promoted startups and other websites. The data comes from r/SideProject and r/SaaS as they seem to be the most common places to self-promote.
It's not all exactly "startups", but about 95% of the links are SaaS apps, stores and landing pages for mobile apps. I've tried my best to filter out social media and other already popular websites, but there probably still are a few.
I've also checked every single website to see if it's still up, abandoned, rebranded, moved or doesn't respond at all. Here are the results:
Still operating
Abandoned
Redirects
Not found
Other errors
10080
5423
1495
441
728
Let's say that roughly about 50% of the redirects are rebrands and the others are expired domains/ad redirects. This sums up to:
Operating websites
Gave up
60%
40%
Even though it's said that "most startups fail", there's plenty that are still operating. Domains and servers aren't free so you could say that most of these are making at least enough to cover their operating costs.
Domains
Total
Still Operating
Abandoned
.com
9600
5458
4142
.io
1873
1061
812
.co
1027
491
536
.ai
514
389
125
.net
307
152
155
End with "ify"
99
55
44
Start with "go"
98
47
51
Start with "try"
55
19
36
The most popular .com domain alternatives are .io, .co and .ai!
Year
Total links
Total upvotes
Avg. upvotes per post
2018
956
7478
7.82
2019
2055
16720
8.14
2020
3017
30412
10.08
2021
2951
38054
12.90
2022
2307
18133
7.86
2023
5753
26614
4.63
Another interesting statistic is that these subreddits have grown quite a bit, yet less and less people actually upvote posts. The increased amount of blatant bot/ai generated content probably plays a big role here.
I also wrote about all the tech details, how I did it and included the whole spreadsheet with all domains and reddit posts in this blog post.
So yeah this is my little 2-day case study. Thoughts?
It's not all exactly "startups", but about 95% of the links are SaaS apps, stores and landing pages for mobile apps. I've tried my best to filter out social media and other already popular websites, but there probably still are a few.
I've also checked every single website to see if it's still up, abandoned, rebranded, moved or doesn't respond at all. Here are the results:
Still operating
Abandoned
Redirects
Not found
Other errors
10080
5423
1495
441
728
Let's say that roughly about 50% of the redirects are rebrands and the others are expired domains/ad redirects. This sums up to:
Operating websites
Gave up
60%
40%
Even though it's said that "most startups fail", there's plenty that are still operating. Domains and servers aren't free so you could say that most of these are making at least enough to cover their operating costs.
Domains
Total
Still Operating
Abandoned
.com
9600
5458
4142
.io
1873
1061
812
.co
1027
491
536
.ai
514
389
125
.net
307
152
155
End with "ify"
99
55
44
Start with "go"
98
47
51
Start with "try"
55
19
36
The most popular .com domain alternatives are .io, .co and .ai!
Year
Total links
Total upvotes
Avg. upvotes per post
2018
956
7478
7.82
2019
2055
16720
8.14
2020
3017
30412
10.08
2021
2951
38054
12.90
2022
2307
18133
7.86
2023
5753
26614
4.63
Another interesting statistic is that these subreddits have grown quite a bit, yet less and less people actually upvote posts. The increased amount of blatant bot/ai generated content probably plays a big role here.
I also wrote about all the tech details, how I did it and included the whole spreadsheet with all domains and reddit posts in this blog post.
So yeah this is my little 2-day case study. Thoughts?