According to a new report out today (PDF) by CENTR, which is the European country code TLD organisation, as of December 31, there are 311.5 million domain names in the world.
158.7 million domain names are Legacy TLD’s including .com, .net and .org; 140.1 million are ccTLD’s (country codes), 1.6 Million are IDN ccTLD’s, and 10.9 Million are New gTLD’s.
The CENTR writes:
“In absolute terms, most growth came from legacy gTLDs (largely .com) which grew higher than average due to sales in China. ccTLDs grew a combined 3.2% over Q4 2015 – similar to the average observed for the fourth quarter over the past few years. New gTLDs grew from 7.6 to almost 11 million domains over around 800 TLDs”
The top 10 ccTLD’s are listed by the CENTR are:
COUNTRY / ccTLD DOMAINS(millions)
China (.CN) 16.4
Germany (.DE) 16.0
United Kingdom (.UK) 10.6
Netherlands (.NL) 5.6
Russian Federation (.RU) 5.0
European Union (.EU) 3.9
Brazil (.BR) 3.7
Australia (.AU) 3.0
France (.FR) 2.9
Italy (.IT) 2.9
This chart shows the top 5 European ccTLD’s in terms of growth for 2015 and how the percentage that different types of domain extensions are registered by those in Europe:
Here is the chart showing the growth in Legacy domain extensions in 2015:
It would be interesting to know how many domain registrants there are in the world, individuals and businesses. In other words, how many people or what % of the world’s population owns at least one domain, and is in control of that 311.5 million total domains.
I think Godaddy published something on this a while back
A very small percentage is the answer
I would guess less than 5%
It would be interesting to see where the growth in new gTLDs is coming from.
Brent
In the report
But .xyz .top, .wang, .win .club, big growth