According to the BBC, .Uk just hit the 10 million domain mark.
The 10th million domain name is swarvemagazine.co.uk which was registered by Steven Northam for a photography-based publication.
Nominet who operates the .Uk registry, “described the news as a “mega-milestone”.
“It took charge of the top-level domain name in 1996 when there were 26,000 .uk sites.”
Nominet’s chief executive, Lesley Cowley, is quoted in the article saying that the .uk registrations are growing at 10% for the past couple of years,” with a renewal rate of around 70%
.uk is the world’s second-most popular country code.
The report claims that there are 10M .uk domain registrations, not .co.uk. Remember that this number would also include .org.uk, .net.uk, etc. domains
Its a great milestone for Nominet who in the main do a good job.
@Puranjay yes you are right but I would guess that .co.uk registrations account for a very high proportion of the 10 million domain names registered
Probably along the lines of 90% of .uk registrations will be .co.uk. No matter what to go from 26,000 registrations to 10,000,000 in that space of time is good going. Especially when you think that over 50% of uk SMEs do not have a website so still plenty of room for growth.
It is an amazing achievement.
This is the kind of thing that will influence .com values in some markets. As the ccTLDs grow, the .com TLD will shift to being a second choice or legacy TLD in those markets however .com is still unbeatable as the global TLD. The 10 million .uk domains puts the task of the new gTLDs into perspective – this, combined with .com TLD is what they are facing in countries like the UK.
As BS would say:
The 10 millionth domain was prabably AnalHorsePorn.org.uk but that wouldnt have been such a good story.
Congrats to Nominet, quite a milestone! 🙂