NomansiteNews
How the register is built, what changed in the method, and what each monthly snapshot turned out to show.
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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