Verisign has announced The Domain Name Industry Brief for Second Quarter 2022. The report presents that the number of domain names in this quarter has risen to 351.5 million. This is a rise of almost 1 million domains as compared to First Quarter of this year.
With 161.1 million domain names, .com is still the most popular TLD on this planet. It is followed by .cn (20.6 million), .de (17.3 million), .net (13.2 million), .uk (11.1 million), .org (10.6 million), .nl (6.3 million), .ru (5.7 million), .br (5 million) and .xyz (4.2 million) respectively. The gap between .com and the second most popular extension .cn is worthwhile. .com has higher registrations, as compared to the .cn, by a multiple of eight!
The list also gives statistics on the popularity of different ccTLDs. Among ccTLDs, the most popular one is obviously .cn, the ccTLD of China. It is followed by .de, .uk, .nl, .ru, .br, .fr, .eu, .au and .it ccTLDs. .de is the extension of Germany. The nation is also called Deutschland, which is an endonym of Germany. The .de extension is an ode to that.
There was an unusual downfall noted in this quarter as well. The total number of domains with .net and .com TLDs stood at 174.3 million domain names. This is 0.4 million lesser than the figures reported in the previous quarter. However, on an year on year basis, i.e. in comparison with the Second Quarter of 2021, the net number of these two types of domains increased by 3.7 million. An increase of 2.2%.
On an year on year basis, the total number of domain names increased by 10.4 million or 3%.
The figures show the complete dominance of the .com in the domain name industry. It trumps the second most popular extension by as many as eight times. However, as mentioned above a little slowdown in .com domain space was observed in the second quarter. As compared to the previous quarter .com domain names shrunk by 0.2 million. Although the dip is small, this may point towards signs of saturation with this apex extension.
It’d be interesting how conventional domain names and specially .com domain names fare against the rise of blockchain domain names such as Ethereum Name System.
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