NomansiteNews
How the register is built, what changed in the method, and what each monthly snapshot turned out to show.
Awards from other juries now count in Reach
Until today Reach knew only links: a studio's own domain and the sites it built. From today it also knows what other juries thought of the work, from The FWA to the Webbys, and a studio can add its awards itself.
→The register now has a jury
Everything here is measured. Whether the work is any good is a different question, and no crawler can answer it — so we asked the studios that have already taken a place to answer it instead.
→You can now see how often your pages are opened
A studio that has claimed its card can now see how many times its pages were opened, day by day. Not a guess and not an estimate — the same visits our own server recorded.
→Studios can now add themselves to No Man Site
Until now the only way onto the register was for us to find you. Now a studio can introduce itself — though it still cannot invent its portfolio. Your identity belongs to you; the evidence belongs to the register.
→You no longer need DNS to prove a studio is yours
Eleven studios started proving ownership of their domain. Not one completed it. Both methods worked — and both were asking the wrong person to do the work.
→A studio can disappear. Its domain can live forever.
A studio builds a site in 2014 and leaves its name in the footer. Years later the crawler finds that signature — but the studio is gone, and the domain now tells an entirely different story.
→We removed 1,006 names that were never studios
For a while, blogger.com was the 25th biggest web studio in the world according to our ranking. The number was not invented. The classification was.
→The register learns cities
Nobody looks for a directory of studios. People look for a studio in a city — so the register now answers by city, tells you which cities are nearest to you, and ranks the ten strongest studios in each.
→September 2026: the first ranking snapshot
The register now takes a snapshot on the first day of every month — the hundred studios with the highest reach in the world and the top ten in each of 123 countries. Here is what the first one shows.
→What this register counts, and what it refuses to count
There is no registry of web studios anywhere — Wikidata lists 119 design firms for the entire world. So we built one from things nobody publishes as a list, and we count only what can be observed.
→Directories as a list of links, not a source of truth
Award galleries and agency catalogues know thousands of studios we did not. We take from them exactly one thing — addresses to visit — and keep counting for ourselves.
→The register opens
Everything the project had learned by the end of August became a public page: studios, countries, languages, and the one number nobody else has — how many other people's sites carry a studio's signature.
→The map, and the first thousands
OpenStreetMap knows where studios sit — 18 000 offices with a website tag. It became the seed of the register, and the first lesson in what a seed is worth.
→What is not a studio
Half of building a register is deciding what to throw out. Website builders, portfolio platforms, brands that hired somebody else — each of them looked exactly like a studio until it didn't.
→Reading footers in twenty languages
«Site by», «Realisierung», «Réalisation», «Разработка сайта» — the algorithm that turns the bottom of a stranger's website into a fact about a studio, and everything that tried to fool it.
→What can be measured from outside
A studio cannot hide the sites it built. They are public, and most of them carry its name at the bottom. That is the signal we decided to count — and the principle the whole register rests on.
→The question we started with
Ask the web who builds the web and you get advertising. Every catalogue of agencies is filled by the agencies themselves — so we went looking for a way to count instead of asking.
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