Internet companies are still regularly going out of business, but the overall collapse appears to be bottoming out.
More than twice as many Internet companies shut down or declared bankruptcy in 2001 as in the preceding year, according to recent research, but the two-year Ice Age that brought the wave of extinctions is showing signs of a spring thaw.
At least 537 Internet companies folded in the past year, compared with 225 in 2000, according to Webmergers.com, a company that provides research to the Internet industry.
E-commerce and content sites were hit the hardest over the past two years, comprising two-thirds of sites that failed in the harsh climate of a crashing economy and anemic stock market. E-commerce companies accounted for nearly 35 percent of the failures in 2001, down from 54 percent in 2000, while news, entertainment and other content sites made up 24 percent of the shutdowns in 2001, and 27 percent in 2000.
News source: ZDnet Business News
