What are the trends in domain registration for 2022? Is the domain registration market growing or shrinking? Which is the most popular domain name extension? Are ccTLDs popular, and what are the top10? What are ngTLDs, and what percentage do they represent?
If you are wondering about any of the above and looking for ideas to make the best domain choice for your site, then you are in the right place!
We recently read the report for the last quarter of 2021 presented by Verisign, a global provider of domain name registry services and internet infrastructure, and we share some helpful information.
Domain name registration is constantly growing
Every year domain name registrations are constantly growing, and there is impressive data for this. The last quarter of 2021 closed with 341.7 million domain registrations regarding all the TLDs, meaning all the extensions in total. Also, there was a 1% increase compared to the previous quarter, while the percentage is increasing by 0.5% every year, which means 1.6 million new registrations! Therefore, this shows a trend towards creating more sites and more and more people and businesses taking care of their digital presence.
.COM is the most popular extension
The .COM and .NET TLDs in the last quarter of 2021 had a combined total of 173.4 million domain registrations, recording an increase of 1.4 million new registrations compared to the previous quarter while increasing year-over-year by 5%. The .COM extension ranks first in public preference worldwide, with 160 million registrations.
The public prefers the ccTLDs
The ccTLDs are country-code top-level domains, extensions that indicate a geographical location, such as .GR or .UK. Total ccTLD domain name registrations were 127.4 million at the end of the fourth quarter of 2021, recording an increase of 0.6%, compared to the third quarter of 2021. As a result, the public seems to prefer country-code extensions.
The top10 of the ccTLDs
The top 10 ccTLDs, as shown in the table below, are .de (Germany), .cn (China), .uk (United Kingdom), .nl (Netherlands), .ru (Russia), .br ( Brazil), .fr (France), .eu (European Union), .it (Italy) and .au (Australia).
It is noticeable that these top 10 domain extensions represent 58.7% of all ccTLDs registrations.
The ngTLDs have a significant percentage of preference
The ngTLDs are extensions that typically indicate certain types of businesses, such as .STORE, .SHOP, .SITE, and the like. These are the so-called “new TLDs”.
The percentage they represent of all domain registrations is 7.2%, which corresponds to 24.7 million registrations. This is a non-negligible percentage! In the graph below, you can see the 10 most popular, which, as shown schematically, represent 50.6% of the total ngTLD domain registrations.
Given the information above, you can more easily decide which extension to choose for your website. Moreover, it is clear that it is worth registering more than one extension for your site to protect your brand! For instance, if you have a store called mygreekjewels, in addition to the .gr extension, it would also be useful to register a .store, a .shop, etc. extension!
You may find more information regarding the Verisign survey on their page verisign.com/dnibarchives.
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