The Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority (TDRA), the telecommunications regulatory authority in the United Arab Emirates, announced the state of .ae domain names in the year 2021. The Regulatory Authority announced that 15,000 new .ae domain names were registered in the previous year. This takes the tally of total number of .ae domain names registered at the end of 2021 to 237,000.
.ae is still a lot behind a number of other top ccTLDs operating now. As for instance, the most popular ccTLD, i.e., .cn has more than 20 million registrations. Even the 10th most popular ccTLD, .fr has more than 3.4 million domain names registered. For a country as amazing and wonderful as UAE, these figures clearly do not do the justice.
Although the number does seem short when compared to other big ccTLDs, in its own pace .ae is doing good. At the end of 2017, the total number of .ae domain names registered were 210,000. Compared to figures at the end of 2021, that’s an average of 6,750 increase per year (2021 included). However, as the revealed figures state, 2021 had 15,000 registrations alone. That’s almost twice, of 2021’s expected average share. 2021 also accounts for 71% for all new .ae registration since 2017.
So, it can be concluded that .ae, though still needs to work hard to compete with the bigger ccTLDs, in its own path it is doing pretty well. With 2021 being exceptionally good for the Arabian ccTLD.
Fun fact: The Internationalised Country Code Top-level Domain in the Arabic script of UAE is امارات. It is represented as .xn--mgbaam7a8h in Punycode.
Join the Discussion