Are websites closing down en masse?

[Akira Urushibata <afu@wta.att.ne.jp>]

Recently I feel I frequently encounter defunct links.  Links to
external material toward the bottom of Wikipedia articles often turn
out to be unavailable.

I don't know if there is any empirical data on this.  I can provide an
example from a page I help maintain.  From what I see here I am pretty
sure that sites are closing down or pages are being culled en masse
for some reason:

https://netpbm.sourceforge.net

The ahove URL is the introductionary web page for the Netpbm software
package.  At the end of the page is a list of translations of the same
into various languages.

In early May this year I found out that out of 31 translations,
6 were not available:

  * Russian
  * Malay
  * Indonesian
  * German
  * Polish
  * Belarusian

A recent survey (late November) showed that 4 more translations
have disappeared:

  * Spanish
  * Urdu
  * Greek
  * Estonian 

Out of 31 translations 10 or 32.5% have disappeared.  Only 21 remain.

There must be an explanation for the rapid loss of sites and pages.

Some sites hosting the translations look unrelated to system software.
Netpbm is well-known and links in the official Netpbm document pages
cause search engines to elevate the status of the liked pages and
their links.  In other words some people add the translations to their
sites for SEO.

One possibility I can think of is that hosting services are somehow
affected by inflation, higher interest rates and staff cutbacks at IT
firms.  If anybody has better insight on the matter I'd very much like
to learn.

Thank you for reading.

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