Top Level Domains

Posted by Sam Soltano on 21 December 2009 in News, Top Level Domains

While one could argue that a domain is not a web technology, we still decided to include a top level domain survey on our site, simply because we found the results interesting enough.

There are of course other domain statistics published. Ours is different, as it contains only the top 1 million websites, as measured by Alexa. The reason why we do this for the domain report as well as for all the other reports is domain spamming. People occasionally try to build link farms by registering many thousands websites. Often, all these sites disappear again overnight. Statistics that include only sites with a certain popularity show a much more robust measurement.

The top level domain survey shows more than 50% of the sites are registered under .com. Other popular generic domains are .net, .org and .info. The most frequent country domains are Germany, Russia, Japan, UK and China. Some of the generic domains such as .coop and .jobs are used so rarely that one wonders if it was worth defining then at all.

The next big change in the domain system will be to allow a certain number of "brand" domains to be registered, for instance .google or .ebay. I do not expect that to have a huge impact on our statistics because the number of these sites might remain relatively small. But who can predict what the web will be like in the future.

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