ccTLD Registrations Growing

Top 10 TLDs Has Some Surprises

[jmccormac]

I've been working on some domain 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.

Regards...jmcc

[weeks]

Interesting.
I'm a novice in this, but the dot.info strength is surprising to me.

I would have thought dot.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.

Why are you surprised about dot.ru?

Never cared for dot.biz.

[jmccormac]

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.

Regards...jmcc

[maximillianos]

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.

[jmccormac]

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.

Regards...jmcc

[weeks]

We all know how important it can be to a new firm to have a dot.com TLD, but this puts a number on it.

[jmccormac]

What I've seen from work on ccTLDs is that many new ccTLD domains also have the equivalent .com registered at the same time if it is available. I have some .us ccTLD data being crunched at the moment so I should have an idea about how domain registration patterns in that ccTLD compare to the gTLDs in the next day or so.

Regards...jmcc

[HuskyPup]

In the top ten, six are related to nations,

Five, .eu is not a nation and never will be:-)

[Petrogold]

@jmccormac & other folks:
Thank you for sharing the data.I registered ccTLDs one word & keywords since 10 years, never saw any type ins. So it needed to be branded by developing to get traffic. That is the difference in .Com TLD & ccTLDs or even .info .mobi etc TLDs.
So far I do not see any light there.

[jmccormac]

@Petrogold It could be due to the way that people remember things. They remember the name of a shop and that the shop is on a certain street or in a certain area of the city. A ccTLD is like a city or even a country in that people know and remember, to some extent, the sites that they regularly visit. The gTLDs are like a place that people go on holidays. They may remember where they have visited but they are not going to regularly visit it. There is that sense of "us" about a ccTLD that a gTLD does not have. This could mean that people think in terms of places, names and brands when it comes to ccTLDs but they think in terms of generics when they deal with gTLDs. The type-in traffic in .com is due to people typing in a term and expecting that such a website exists. The volume of type-in traffic appears to make this kind of direct navigation work because the traffic is coming from everywhere. However with ccTLDs, the majority of the traffic will be typically be from that country. People from outside that country searching for something in a ccTLD will typically use a search engine thus bypassing the whole type-in traffic route.

Regards...jmcc

[graeme_p]

Five, .eu is not a nation and never will be:-)

Nation is an ill-defined word - shall we say country? Having a parliament, a flag and laws that have more authority than those of its constituent parts should qualify it, and ICANN lists it on a page of ccTLDs [icann.org ].

In this context its size and nature make it reasonable to compare it the ccTLDs of large countries like the US, China or India, rather than with gTLDs.

I am quite surprised that it has that many registrations given that you do have a choice of using .eu or an individual EU states' ccTLDs.

[jmccormac]

The .eu ccTLD is really not a true ccTLD in that it has approximately 27 constituent markets. It only appears big due to the cumulative registration volume. In real terms it is a third or fourth choice TLD in the EU countries and it is rarely, if ever, used as a primary brand. Broken down on a country by country basis, the numbers of .eu domains registered in an EU country would be between 5% to 15% of that country's ccTLD registrations. The last quarter's Eurid report had the country breakdowns by registrar which is far more accurate an indication of the numbers of .eu domains registered in each country. The figure for Ireland was about 8K which ties in with the numbers of .eu domains on Irish hosters. The Irish .eu figure on the Eurid website is artificially inflated by Canadian and US cyberwarehousing operations and direct navigation operations using Irish front companies to warehouse their .eu domains. The UK's registrar .eu figure is around 59K and its figure on the Eurid website is also inflated by non-EU cyberwarehousing and direct navigation operations. There is a significant level of brand protection registrations in .eu ccTLD but these domains are often not even set up in DNS and where they are set up, they point to the real ccTLD or .com website of the business.

Regards...jmcc

[walkman]

.com is the defacto .us so no surprises there 'Weeks.' Big companies have and promote their .com URLs.

We just need Goog to let us target cctlds to US via web console for a very good reason: I own quite a few of them :)

As for type-ins, you need to register them in the local language not insurance.cctld in a country that speak Arabic. But of course no country has the duo of US gdp and internet usage

Having a parliament, a flag and laws that have more authority than those of its constituent parts should qualify it, and ICANN lists it on a page of ccTLDs

Do the British, the Germans and the Greeks feel "European" first or .... There is your answer.

[Petrogold]

@Vjmccormac:
Nice explanations and example.Thanks & regards,

[Petrogold]

@walkman- yes, I was having girl.ae then dropped w/o hope. What I had to do to make it a brand? Now another owner registered it.Still I have the authority to get more names on partnership, but bad thing is-no online registration facility yet. Feedback please.
@jmccormac: Kindly tell more about DNS set up for ccTLD.What exactly is required ?

[catchnames]

@Petrogold what CCTLDS you have? I get traffic on .co.in and .in. And they are fairly new.
Thanks

[ronin]

<aside>

Do the British, the Germans and the Greeks feel "European" first or .... There is your answer.

Far from feeling 'European', many of the British don't even feel 'British'. South of the border a large percentage feel 'English'. North of the border an even higher percentage feel 'Scottish'.

It may not be too late to say that while the 'English national project' (a matter of convincing the Northumbrians, Mercians, and others that they were all 'English') worked, pretty much, (give or take the still existing North/South divide), the 'British national project' first mooted by James I & VI in 1603 when he proposed renaming Scotland as 'North Britain' has pretty much failed.

Thus the chance of there being a significant minority in the UK which feels 'European' appearing any time soon, is pretty slim. Regrettably.
</aside>

After much hesitation and hand-wringing I have bought my first .mobi domain this week.

In an attempt to weigh up whether this was a sensible idea or not (taking into account the m.example.com convention) I trawled the web looking for discussions and articles.

Alarmingly, almost all discussions about whether .mobi was a good idea or not appear to have stopped in 2007. Which either puts me craftily ahead of some unanticipated future curve or WAAAY behind the curve. Time will tell.

Either way, I don't imagine .mobi is going to rocket into the top 10 TLDs any time soon.

Specifically, I am wondering how are cross-border organisations going to handle .mobi?

If example.nl and example.de are the Dutch-language & German-language equivalents of example.com... what are the Dutch and German equivalents of example.mobi?

[robho]

Alarmingly, almost all discussions about whether .mobi was a good idea or not appear to have stopped in 2007. Which either puts me craftily ahead of some unanticipated future curve or WAAAY behind the curve.

The latter. "Mobi is dead" discussions started in 2008. They were right.

Which incidentally is a good reason why the proposed unlimited extensions will never succeed (with the possible exception of a few extensions in non-latin scripts). There just isn't the need for them. When was the last time you visited a .travel or .pro site?

Rob

[jmccormac]

Just on the ".mobi is dead" thing - the .mobi domain count from this morning's zonefile was 969061 and it has been growing slowly but steadily. That's a global domain count whereas .nl (3.9M approx) and .de (13.72M) are beating .com in their respective markets. The extensions that have the best chances initially are the large city gTLDs. If and when these go live, they will damage the value of geo domains in .com or elsewhere.

@Petrogold Some ccTLDs require that you have the DNS set up and working before they will add the domain to the zonefile. This is different from .com or the gTLDS where there is no such check when registering a domain name. It can cause problems with some registrars who have little experience with ccTLDs.

@ronin There was some talk of country code .mobi subdomains (.uk.mobi etc) but I don't think that much happened with it. In terms of domain footprints, the .mobi count for Irish hosters on 01/June/2010 was 1002. This puts it at just under half the .biz count. Like most European countries, Ireland's domain footprint is mainly focused on the .ie ccTLD/.com.

I've just started tracking .us ccTLD. This morning's .us domain count was 1616405 domains. Not bad but it could and should be doing a lot better.

Regards...jmcc

[walkman]

I've just started tracking .us ccTLD. This morning's .us domain count was 1616405 domains. Not bad but it could and should be doing a lot better."

I predict (and hope to see) .usstate tlds. Quite a few services and products are state specific, so 'service'.ny makes perfect sense.

[edited by: walkman at 6:20 pm (utc) on Jul 1, 2010]

[jmccormac]

The US states all have their own sub domain under .us (or.us, ca.us etc). Some of ICANN regulations exclude some geographic domains such as countries. I'm not sure how US states will be covered as they may have to use a three letter or more approach. (Two letter codes are used for country code TLDs.)

Regards...jmcc

[Derek_Pater]

what about .ASIA?

That has been my hardest to get

[jmccormac]

Well these are the .asia domain counts at the first of the month for 2010:
January | February| March | April | May | June | July
215,870 | 216,702 | 217,709 | 211,550 | 207,586 | 183,477 | 180,739

It hasn't being doing well.

Regards...jmcc

[Derek_Pater]

Hi JMCC,
yes the companies I deal with in Asia, do use .COM a lot even using miss spellings, because they prefer a .COM

thanks for the Info

[jmccormac]

The problem for .asia is that it is up against some strong ccTLD in the region. The .cn ccTLD is the obvious one but Japan has .jp and Korea has .kr. Both of those are over 1M domains each. The .in should be around 500K domains and .nz is around 400K. The .au is around 1.7M. Hong Kong's .hk is at around 190K domains. Even Israel's .il (approx 170K) and .ir's .ir (approx 162K) are potential competition. The .com is the logical option for the region. As a brand, .asia really has a very hard time convincing people that it is a viable alternative to .com or the local ccTLD. With .cn losing over 6M domains this year, there is a very slim chance that .asia could benefit. However most of the domains that .cn has lost would have been bubble/extremely low cost domains that were not renewed when the price increased. The new registration restrictions have not helped .cn either.

Regards...jmcc

[Derek_Pater]

I find this all very interesting:

Could you please tell me more about your below comments

The new registration restrictions have not helped .cn either.

I was looking at both Taiwan and China Domains because that's who I deal directly with from here in Australia
for new products

It looks good if you carry the countries you deal with their Domains, its about the mindset!

[HuskyPup]

jmcc

I'm sure I found a site a few years ago listing every extension and its registration numbers.

Any ideas?

[jmccormac]

I know one too but I can't mention it here because of the charter. Promoting one's own site, even if it is the only one of its kind in the world, is frowned upon. :) It only covers about 50 TLDs though. It is actually quite difficult to get ccTLD domain counts out of some registries. Some such as .ch and .li only publish quarterly. Others have a few months of a delay. There are a few who are quite good about publishing stats and have them on the front page of their registry website.

Regards...jmcc

[jmccormac]

@Derek_Pater
Basically the .cn registry (CNNIC) required official identification from last December.
[cnnic.net.cn...]

Regards...jmcc

[HuskyPup]

I know one too but I can't mention it here because of the charter.

Doh! I knew I had seen it somewhere, thanks for the reminder:-)