Nominet held their second annual .uk registrar conference at Wembley
Stadium last week where they released their Domain Name Industry Report
2008 that highlights some interesting statistics about domain name
registrations both in the United Kingdom and throughout the world.
With the market share of Country code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs)
increasing, the .com market share has fallen from 50% in 2005 to 45%
now according to the report, and this is evidence that the market share
of Generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs) being eroded.
gTLDs such as .com, .net and .org, have been most affected with annual
growth rates falling from over 30 per cent growth in 2006 to under 10
per cent this year to date. Meanwhile ccTLDs as a group have fared
better with growth rates only falling from 37 to 26 per cent. However,
this is mainly due to huge growth in certain ccTLDs such as China and
Russia.
As well as focussing on the .uk market, the report also looks more
widely at ccTLDs in particular, with .uk the third largest ccTLD behind
.cn (China) and .de (Germany). .nl (Netherlands) and .eu (European
Union) round out the top 5 followed by .ar (Argentina) and .ru (Russian
Federation). .fr (France) .pl (Poland) and .es (Spain) are all big
movers up in their top 20 list, while .ch (Switzerland), .jp (Japan)
and .kr (Korea) all drop noticeably due to growth rates being not as
high as others. .au (Australia) remains in twelfth place.
When comparing total domain name registrations in countries, the United
States leads with 55.24 million registrations followed by Germany
(17.25m), the United Kingdom (11.23m) and China (10.94m).
Countries with less restrictive rules on registering domain names tend
to have higher rates of ccTLD registrations. Examples of these are
France and Spain, however in recent years both have liberalised their
registration rules. Australia, India and Spain are also examples with
lower proportions of ccTLD registrations and more restrictive
registration rules.
The report also has an interesting comparison of GDP and domain name
registrations. A number of countries over perform considerably on
domain names versus GDP, most notably Netherlands and Argentina. Japan
and the United States on the other hand appear to show low levels of
ccTLD registrations when ranked against their GDP. This highlights the
reliance and preference in both of these countries for generic domain
names such as .com.
On the distribution of gTLDs across the world, all gTLDs are dominated
by sales in USA, with registrations from the USA accounting for around
50% of each gTLD.
Of all the gTLDs, the smallest proportion of .com registrants are based
in Europe, with 21 per cent. The gTLD with the largest proportion of
its registrants based in Europe is .info, with 37% and .biz follows
closely behind with 31 per cent. The report suggests that European
businesses are more open to a range of different TLDs, whilst
non-European are most keen on .com, to the detriment of the other gTLDs.
Outside of North America, .com registrations are highest as a total of
all registrations in any larger country in the United Kingdom with 4.7
per cent of all registrations .com followed by Germany (4.5%), China
(3.2%), France (2.4%) and Australia (2.0%).
The report breaks down all of the gTLDs into regional distributions.
For .org registrations, Germany has 8.2 per cent of all registrations
and 8.5 per cent of all .net registrations. In other gTLDs, Germany has
the most .info and .biz registrations outside the United States in
large countries with 9.6 and 7.9 per cent of registrations
respectively. The United Kingdom leads with 6.3 per cent of .mobi
registrations .
Nominet's Domain Name Industry Report 2008 can be downloaded from www.nominet.org.uk/go/dnir.
To register your .uk domain name, check out EuroDNS here.
David Goldstein