The Covid-19 pandemic had an unequal impact across businesses and communities and rapidly accelerated digital trends in the economy. What role, then, did website use play in community resilience and small business outcomes? This article examines a new source of population data on domain name hosts to provide a unique measure of digital economic activity within communities. Seventy-five percent are commercial, including online-only, brick-and-mortar, small, and microbusinesses. With geolocated data on 20 million US domain name hosts, we investigate how their density (per 100 people) affected economic outcomes in the nation’s largest metros during the pandemic. Using monthly time series data for the 50 largest metropolitan areas, the domain host data is merged with the US Census Small Business Pulse Surveys and Chetty et al.’s Opportunity Insights data. Results indicate metros with higher concentrations of businesses with an online presence experienced more positive economic perceptions and outcomes from April to December 2020. This high-frequency, granular data on digital economic activity suggests that digitally enabled small and microbusinesses played an important role in local economic resilience and demonstrates how commercial data can be used to generate new insights in a fast-changing environment.

Covid-19 大流行对企业和社区产生了不平等的影响，并迅速加速了经济的数字化趋势。那么，网站的使用在社区复原力和小型企业成果方面发挥了什么作用？本文研究了域名主机上的新人口数据来源，以提供社区内数字经济活动的独特衡量标准。 75% 是商业企业，包括纯在线企业、实体企业、小型企业和微型企业。通过 2000 万个美国域名主机的地理定位数据，我们调查了它们的密度（每 100 人）如何影响大流行期间美国最大都市的经济成果。使用 50 个最大都市区的每月时间序列数据，将域托管数据与美国人口普查小型企业脉搏调查和 Chetty 等人的机会洞察数据合并。结果表明，从 2020 年 4 月到 12 月，拥有在线业务的企业更集中的城市经历了更积极的经济认知和成果。有关数字经济活动的高频、精细数据表明，数字化小微企业在当地经济中发挥了重要作用弹性并展示了如何使用商业数据在快速变化的环境中产生新的见解。