Why Is It Similar Sized Countries Have Much More/Less Domain Names

[HuskyPup]

I was going through jmcc's site the other day and it jumped out that similar sized population countries have such a big difference in domain name registrations and one, expecially Japan, is so much lower.

For instance by domain extension December 2010:

1 - .de - 14,007,185
2 - .uk - 8,966,685
3 - .nl - 4,168,836
4 - .it - 2,048,160
5 - .pl - 1,968,230
6 - .fr - 1,857,310
7 - .ca - 1,550,006
8 - .es - 1,257,239
9 - .jp - 1,194,718
10 - .se - 1,054,921

But in order by population:

9 - .jp - 127,360,000
1 - .de - 81,757,600
6 - .fr - 65,821,885
2 - .uk - 62,041,708
4 - .it - 60,418,711
8 - .es - 46,030,109
5 - .pl - 38,192,000
7 - .ca - 34,338,000
3 - .nl - 16,644,900
10 - .se - 9,354,462

It's just a bit of fun for a Sunday afternoon however why do .es .fr .it and .jp not have as high a penteration as .nl? For example if .nl had .fr population proportionately they would have 16,485,565 registrations making them the second bigggest extension after .com!

Does this go to show that the traditional trading/exporting nations haven't changed much?

[topr8]

but what you are not measuring is the .com takeup

eg. i'd say in the UK, both .com and .co.uk are widely in use and both would imply a uk site
also in the uk, the domain uk.com sells sub domains (though why you would buy/use one i have no idea) which seem to be quite popular

[HuskyPup]

but what you are not measuring is the .com takeup

I'm not making a measure v .com I'm just wondering why the Germans, Brits and Dutch obviously see possibly greater value in using their own country's domain or is there proportionately fewer websites in the other countries overall in comparison?

Is there any way of knowing just how many real sites there are in all or just the major economies v name registration and then comparing knowing per capita the usage of the web?

It's just a bit of statistcal fun that I'm sure jmcc will clarify us about:-)

[topr8]

It's just a bit of statistcal fun

yeah, i know that, i'm playing along with the game.

... anyone can buy a .uk domain, which makes it wide open to worldwide speculators, whereas you can't buy a .fr so easily ... my own observation (all be it from a tiny sample) is that lots of uk names are taken by speculators.

i think it would be interesting to compare the metric with how 'popular' the internet is in each of those countries too, although how you measure that i just don't know!

& how many names are bought as part of a portfolio to protect the brand name?

[HuskyPup]

& how many names are bought as part of a portfolio to protect the brand name?

I'm pretty sure that jmcc has the estimated stats on this if I recall correctly.

.de used to be not so easy to obtain but the .nl really surprises me pro rata and considering .eu is not perceived as being popular with 3,312,453 names it's not doing too badly with 50+% more than .biz with 2,050,668!

There's a lot of stuff going on out there which is way below the normal radar.

[jmccormac]

It's just a bit of fun for a Sunday afternoon however why do .es .fr .it and .jp not have as high a penteration as .nl? For example if .nl had .fr population proportionately they would have 16,485,565 registrations making them the second bigggest extension after .com!

Deregulation and open markets has a lot to do with it HuskyPup. The other aspect is the state of the country's infrastructure. I've always considered the domains:population metric to be a bit iffy because of the way that it is common for registrants to own more than one domain name. It works well with some managed registries where the one domain per registrant is still used.

@topr8

but what you are not measuring is the .com takeup

I did some work on grouping gTLD domains with countries and a lot of .com usage is now historical for those ccTLD positive countries in that it is not growing as quickly as the local ccTLD.

I'll post with more details later as I'm in the middle of trying to rebuild a network here after a service upgrade that turned the network into a notwork.

Regards...jmcc

[jmccormac]

i think it would be interesting to compare the metric with how 'popular' the internet is in each of those countries too, although how you measure that i just don't know!

It is possible to do it but it is getting into search engine algorithm territory. The .eu registry Eurid tried to do a mickey mouse state of the .eu web effort after I did a survey of .eu websites and came up with a 13.37% utilisation figure a few years ago. Eurid's methodology owes more to social studies than reality and I don't consider it reliable. The reason is simple: with website you are dealing with what may be human generated content and linguistically, that is not easy to categorise with anything other than highly automated search engine algorithms running over the complete zone. (My approach (though I didn't have a complete .eu zone)) Eurid's mickey mouse effort was to get a bunch of students to look at a sample of websites and then extrapolate from that limited sample. Statistically, the results might be convincing for marketing purposes but the web is far more complex than a tiny sample of a few thousand sites.

The procedure for a TLD survey is actually quite simple:
1. Check all domains for an resolving website.
2. Check all resolving websites.
3. Remove all parked, coming soon, broken and dead websites.
4. Repeat step two for all major languages in that TLD.
5. Generate the stats.
6. Figure out usage patterns.

I did it with a few million .uk and .eu domains and the biggest problem was coding for the phrase "coming soon" or variants in multiple languages. The hard part was coding the parsers because of the variety of ways that people can break HTML and websites. Step 2 results in a lot of data so the storage element has to be well thought out before starting.

As part of my work on the Irish webspace, I do this kind of survey on about 300K domains each month. The usage in the ccTLDs tends to be somewhat higher than that of .com domains, especially when a country becomes ccTLD positive. For most countries, they have a concentration of sites along a ccTLD/com axis. The .net would have approximately 10% of the ccTLD/com, the .org between 5% and 10% with the biz/info having a far lower percentage.

Regards...jmcc

[jmccormac]

I'm pretty sure that jmcc has the estimated stats on this if I recall correctly.

Some of the tables used on the site are updated with the cross TLD comparisons for domains. For the brand protection calculation, the numbers of the same domain sharing nameservers across multiple TLDs was used as the basis. It isn't a perfect way of doing it but there were only about 27K (from memory) domains registered on the same nameservers/hoster across the major TLDs.

.de used to be not so easy to obtain but the .nl really surprises me pro rata and considering .eu is not perceived as being popular with 3,312,453 names it's not doing too badly with 50+% more than .biz with 2,050,668!

The .eu looks big but when you break it down on a country by country basis, some major fault lines are apparent. [eurid.eu...] Some of the figures are about 10% of the each of those country's ccTLD figures. The Irish, UK and Cypriot figures are artificially inflated by non-EU cyberwarehousers. The real killer is usage. The figures from the last Irish survey I did (January 2011) had .eu website usage at .biz levels. The .biz is a global TLD though. There's a consolidation trend where some registrants are beginning to focus on their core registrations (ccTLD and .com) and dropping some of their registrations in smaller gTLDs becoming apparent.

There's a lot of stuff going on out there which is way below the normal radar.

Yep. :)

Regards...jmcc

[HuskyPup]

Great stuff jmcc!

I thought that the .eu cyberwarehousers had actually let drop loads of names but according to your stats .eu registrations actually went up during 2010.

I have to make a decision very soon shortly where to move my companyname.com which I've sold for very good money. I do have the .biz/info/asia/eu all ready to go and even though it's a 16 year old site I'm very hesitant to put it on .eu and I seem to be the only one with a ranking .asia site!

I'm very tempted to go with a .im/gg/je, that'd make people look:-)

[jmccormac]

Much of the .eu's growth in 2010 was due to the IDN boost from December 2009-Feb2010. A lot of those IDN domain names promptly ended up parked and for sale. Some of the larger cyberwarehousers have been dumping .eu domains with those domains being picked up by genuine EU registrants. The next few months will be important for .eu in that some of these IDN domains will drop. The Eastern EU countries have taken to .eu in a big way but the growth in .eu is being driven by a few countries (Germany mainly). I've got a growth comparison chart for .eu growth by country over 2010 but I haven't had a chance to publish it yet due to the network being down for the last week and the site being moved. The .eu growth for Ireland has all but flatlined compared to Irish .ie and .com growth. The UK had a few spikes in growth but I think that they were cyberwarehousing spikes rather than genuine UK interest in .eu domains. UK interest is traditionally low and is massively outstripped by UK .uk and .com registrations. I've been tracking a percentage of .de, .es and .fr ccTLDs and that ccTLD/com concentration is quite apparent.

Regards...jmcc