Dot-com doom as an economic barometer

"Dot-com deathwatch" sites have provided news, gossip, entertainment and a place for angry employees and investors to vent their spleens. But WebMergers.com has gone a step further, seeking to identify business opportunities and trends by tracking the demise of Internet companies.

WebMergers.com just released its report on dot-com failures for the first six months of 2001. The bad news: 330 Internet-related companies failed in the first six months, compared to 225 in all of 2000. That number included 14 ASPs and 48 infrastructure-related companies.

The good news? The overall pace of failures is slowing, with flat numbers for May and June. But there's a dark cloud within that silver lining - the improvement is due to a drop in the failure of B2C ventures, while B2B (business-to-business) failures now comprise a larger percentage of the overall failure pool.

What does this mean for data center operators? Failures of tenant companies - ISPs, ASPs and colocation providers - likely have a ways to go yet. Managing risk continues to be a high priority for owners and operators of Internet facilities.