Global Domain Report the Status Quo of the Domain Industry Global Domain Report Global Domain Report
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GLOBAL DOMAIN REPORT THE STATUS QUO OF THE DOMAIN INDUSTRY GLOBAL DOMAIN REPORT GLOBAL DOMAIN REPORT FIGURES, FACTS AND FUTURE TRENDS 4 TOP-LEVEL DOMAINS 5 ccTLDs 8 gTLDs 12 new gTLDs 14 DOMAIN REGISTRARS 16 CONTENTS THE INTERNETX PERSPECTIVE 18 GLOBAL DOMAIN AFTERMARKET 26 THE SEDO PERSPECTIVE 27 OUTLOOK – HEALTHY GROWTH 38 TABLE OF BIBLIOGRAPHY 38 FIGURES, FACTS AND FUTURE TRENDS The Global Domain Report is the result of a coopera- Even after more than 22 years in the domain industry, tion between two big players in the domain industry: the credo for a successful online business remains the InterNetX, one of the largest B2B domain registrars, same: everything starts with the right domain. Domains and Sedo, the world‘s largest domain aftermarket, have open the space to the diversity users expect on the jointly collected and analyzed over 130 million data net. Every single registered domain offers something sets. The results provide insight into the status quo of else: a blog, an e-commerce shop, a corporate website the domain industry, show latest developments, ten- or a marketplace domain up for sale. dencies and trends on the global domain market and offer a view of potential market and business chances. The domain market itself is constantly changing: Throughout the existence of the publicly-accessible In- The report is based on internal data analyses by ternet, uncountable domains under more than 1,000 InterNetX and Sedo and has been enriched with ver- TLDs have been released for registration and over 369 ified data sources from third parties. Publications of million domains have been registered up to now. Verisign, The Council of European National Top-Level Domains Registries, EURid, IANA and nTLDstats.com have been also evaluated and incorporated into this report. The first part provides various The third part focuses on devel- tables, data and ratio analyses: opments in the secondary domain THE REPORT IS growth rates, market shares and market. The domain aftermarket is DIVIDED INTO THREE registration developments of becoming increasingly important. MAIN PARTS ccTLDs, gTLDs and new gTLDs. The Even if a domain is registered, it collected data deal with all TLDs remains part of the market offer – Firstly, you get a global view of the currently available for registration a valuable asset that keeps many domain market, ranging from regis- and global registration figures. business opportunities open. try to end user, followed by insights from a registrar’s point of view and The second part reveals domain finalized with interesting perspec- registration trends resulting from tives from a leading aftermarket the evaluation of requests that fre- operator. quently reach registrars. 4 TOP-LEVEL DOMAINS The term “top-level domain” (in short: TLD) indicates the part of an Internet address on the right, just after the dot. It is the domain extension of a domain, such as .com in example.com. There are a total of 1,584 different TLDs1. They include ccTLDs (country code top-level domains), gTLDs (generic top-level domains), new gTLDs (new generic top-level domains) and geoTLDs (geographical top-level domains). 1,584 TLDs* 369M domains 1,269 gTLDs* 315 ccTLDs* 207M domains 162M domains 58 53 98 57 1,189 new gTLDs 15 sonsored TLDs* Africa America Asia Euroe 31.6M domains 684K domains 3M 14M 72M 7M * The data listed here are the most recent figures published by ICANN on domain registrations worldwide. The delay results from the pub- 53 geoTLDs* lications of ICANN that receives monthly data from all ICANN-accredited registries and publishes them in an evaluated form. The data are 685K domains taken from the CENTRStats Public TLD Market Report, from evaluations by Nominet and from available figures by nTLDstats.com and refer to September 2019 for the reasons stated above. 1,584 TLDs Top-level domains form the highest level in the hierar- legacy TLDs (unofficial subcategory) chical Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet. This category usually includes all gTLDs that were intro- 51 TLDs are not assigned, 6 retired and 11 are in duced before 2010 such as .com, .net, .org, .biz etc. the test phase. 15 sTLDs (official IANA subcategory) 1,269 gTLDs (official IANA subcategory) A sponsored top-level domain can only be used by entities A generic top-level domain can consist of three or more engaged within the specific industry such as .coop, .gov, .travel. characters. 3 grTLDs (official IANA subcategory) 315 ccTLDs (official IANA subcategory) Restricted generic top-level domains can only be used for A country code top-level domain always consists of two their specified purposes such as .biz, .name, .pro. letters and is used or reserved for a country (e.g. .de for Germany), a sovereign state or a dependent terri- 1 infrastructure TLD (official IANA subcategory) .arpa is the only infrastructure TLD used by the Internet tory (e.g. .ky for Cayman Islands) identified through a Architecture Board for infrastructure purposes. unique ISO country code. There also exist 60 non-Latin character TLDs in individual language versions called 1,189 new gTLDs (unofficial subcategory) IDN ccTLDs. In 2013, new gTLDs started to enter the Internet. Since 7 ccTLDs are not assigned and 2 are retired. then, they have shaped the domain market significantly such as online, .shop, .berlin. There are 53 geographical top-level domains among the new gTLDs in use. 1 Source: IANA (01/08/2020) 5 TOP 15 TLDs2 TLD NUMBER IN MILLIONS GROWTH YOY CISCO RANK** OCTOBER 2019 IN % FILTERED BY TLDS .COM 147.2 4.9 1 .TK* 25.8 N/A 100 .CN* 23.03 N/A 9 .DE 16.3 0.3 16 .NET 13.8 -4.5 2 .UK 13.3 11.4 12 .ORG 10.5 -2.8 3 .TW 6.84 41.6 78 .ICU* 5.1 1,175 189 .NL 5.9 1.2 37 .INFO 5.0 -13.5 20 .RU 5.0 -1.9 11 .BR 4.1 2.6 72 .TOP 3.7 -0.4 95 .EU 3.6 -3.6 19 * TLDs latest official numbers / YoY not available ** As of January 2020 Seven of the world's top 13 TLDs (without .cn and .tk due to missing data) have shown growth in 2019. EXCITING FACT A remarkable performance comes Seven top-level domains that rank among from the constant "front-runner" the top 13 are ccTLDs. This shows that .com. With over 6 million registra- country code extensions are still quite popular and can definitely keep up with tions in 2019, the gTLD has pro- the most frequently registered gTLD .com. duced a significant growth rate of 4.9 %. The popularity of .com is on- going, but .tk, .nl and .de show con- tinuous growth too. 2 Sources: CENTRstats (gTLDs), Nominet (ccTLDs), nTLD stats, Cisco Umbrella Cisco Rank (01/20/20) 3, 4 Source: Verisign Domain Name Industry Brief Volume 16, Issue 4 6 TLD POPULARITY IN VIEW OF THE RELATIVE INTERNET ACTIVITY5 The Cisco Rank is based on an algorithm developed TLDs CISCO UMBRELLA by Cisco Umbrella that reflects the popularity of TLDs POPULARITY LIST based on the relative Internet activity. The calculation is based on the number of unique client IPs visiting the Rank TLD respective domains and is regarded in relation to the 1 .COM sum of all requests to domains. 2 .NET 3 .ORG 4 .IO 5 .CO 6 .MS 7 .TV EXCITING FACT 8 .ME The Cisco ranking was developed during 9 .CN the course of a Hackathon project with 10 .GOOG more than 300 participants. It records the 11 .RU popularity via the respective Internet activ- 12 .UK ity, independently from the call protocols. 13 .NEWS The data is based on a worldwide network 14 .CO.UK of Umbrella with more than 100 billion re- 15 .US quests per day and 65 million active users 16 .DE from 165 countries. 17 .LY 18 .GOV 19 .EU 20 .INFO 5 Cisco Umbrella “Free list of the top 1 million most popular domains” (01/20/2020) 7 ccTLDs 315 ccTLDs worldwide help to preserve the diversity of nations on the Internet. Up to now, a total of 162 million ccTLD domains have been registered – 44.4 % of all registered domains.6 DIVERSITY THROUGH LOCALIZATION The latest study "Diversity through localization" by (Sweden) and .sk (Slovakia) were evaluated. But only a Oxford Information Labs shows that ccTLDs make a selection of domains were examined. As prerequisite, significant contribution to the linguistic diversity on the the examined domains needed to be linked to an active Internet. Although there are more than 60,000 differ- website, parking offers were ignored.7 ent languages, English is the dominant language on The result of the study: on average, 76 % of the web- the web, being used on 54 % of all websites. Between sites under a ccTLD contain content in the respective December 2018 and May 2019, online offers from national language. No ccTLD cameASIA 98 below ccTLDs 64 %, the AFRICA 58 ccTLDs 16.4 million domains under the domain extensions highest result for content in the localEUROPE language 57 ccTLDs showed .cat (Catalonia), .ch (Switzerland), .dk (Denmark), .nl .ru with 90 %. AMERICA 53 ccTLDs (Netherlands), .nu (Niue), .pt (Portugal), .ru (Russia), .se OCEANIA 27 ccTLDs MIDDLE EAST 14 ccTLDs ANTARCTICA 1 ccTLD ccTLDs WORLDWIDE8 ccTLD DISTRIBUTION REGISTERED ccTLD DOMAINS ASIA 98 ccTLDs EUROPE 73 AFRICA 58 ccTLDs ASIA 72 EUROPE 57 ccTLDs OCEANIA 31 AMERICA 53 ccTLDs AMERICA 14 OCEANIA 27 ccTLDs AFRICA 3 MIDDLE EAST 14 ccTLDs MIDDLE EAST 1.6 ANTARCTICA 1 ccTLD ANTARCTICA NO DATA MOST POPULAR ccTLDs9 EUROPE 73 10 RANK ccTLD NUMBERASIA OF REGISTRATIONS72 CISCO RANK 1 .TK 25.8M OCEANIA 31 100 2 .CN 23.0M AMERICA 14 9 AFRICA 3 3 .DE 16.3M 16 MIDDLE EAST 1.6 4 .UK 13.3M 12 ANTARCTICA NO DATA 5 .TW 6.8M 78 6 Source: CENTR, Nominet (2019/20) 7 Sources: Oxford Information Labs, CENTR: Diversity through localization (2019) 8, 9 Source: CENTRstats (October 2019) 10 Source: Cisco