I’ve been working on some domain names stats comparing ccTLD growth with gTLDs. The gTLD figures (com/net/org/info) are those for 01/June/2010. The ccTLD figures are those for the end of May 2010. What a lot of people with a purely gTLD focus don’t realise is that there is life outside of .com TLD. The top 10 ccTLDs on their own had over 47 million domains registered at the end of May 2010. Adding the ccTLDs with over one million domains registered brings the ccTLD figure up to just over 59 million domains. The .cn figure has been falling month on month but it is still the number three ccTLD. What’s really strange is the number ten TLD.
- .com: 87,528,607
- .de: 13,692,618
- .net: 13,067,210
- .uk: 8,533,377
- .org: 8,312,156
- .cn: 7,620,043
- info: 6,320,784
- .nl: 3,920,715
- .eu: 3,214,556
- .ru: 2,842,784
The .biz gTLD with 2,055,934 does not make it into the top ten TLDs. I would have thought .us would have caught on more as well. In the top ten, six are related to nations, so you would think it would rate above info.
The .info has always been larger because of the promotions from registrars. This causes a boom and bust growth cycle but it is a well recognised TLD. The .us ccTLD is around 1.6M domains so it is doing relatively well. With a bit of promotion and development it could easily be in the top ten. The .us is in the worst position of having .com as the de-facto US domain of choice.
The .ru ccTLD figure is surprising because it is rarely mentioned and it is such a large market. For the last few years the focus has been on the .de, .uk and .cn ccTLDs. The growth in .biz is steady but slow.
I’m surprised ORG is lower than NET in the list. I rarely encounter NET sites. But I guess these stats are not based on active sites, just registrations.
The stats are based on domain name counts from the zonefiles and the domain counts from the ccTLD registries. The .org was traditionally used for the backend of internet operations though it did see some use when the equivalent .com domain was not available. The .org was far more popular in website terms given its original use was for non-profit organisations. However the numbers of domains with websites are a fraction of the number of registered domain names.
