52 Domain Facts and Statistics That You Wouldn’t Believe in 2024

Top-level domain (TLD) refers to the extension at the end of a domain name. For example, .com and .co.uk are both TLDs.

Whilst a domain name may seem like a simple thing, it represents your business, brand, and name. A TLD should be memorable, relevant and easy to type or spell. After all, if someone gets your domain name wrong, they’ll either end up on someone else’s website or will give up trying to reach yours.

It may not be at the top of your priority list, but at UK Web Host Review we’ve put together a bunch of interesting domain facts and statistics you wouldn’t believe. It’s important to have a nosey through what we have here and get your 2024 off to a successful start!

General Domain Statistics

There are currently 26.3 million generic TLD domains
46.9% of all globally registered TLDs are .com
China has the highest number of registered domains
Over 23 million domain names have been registered as generic TLDs since 2013
.xyz is the top generic TLD
4.1% of the most popular TLDs are .net
Around 348.7 million domain names were registered across all top-level domains in Q4 of 2018
TLDs first came about in 1985 by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA)
At the end of 2019, 1,517 different domain extensions or TLDs existed
In September 2019, there was an increase of 4% of domain name registrations, meaning 0.9 million more domain name registrations added than in the previous quarter

Domain Usage Statistics

As of January 2020, the number of TLDs hit 1,246
The topmost popular generic TLDs registered are .com, .org, .net, .co
At the end of November 2018, 46.9% of all globally registered domains used the .com TLD
5.2% of all domains registered use .org
As of January 2020, there were 31.7 million new generic TLD domains
.site is the fastest growing generic TLD
.top is the biggest selling generic TLD
The largest country-code TLD in Q3 2019 was .tk with 25.1 million registrations
The second-largest country-code TLD is .cn (China) with over 22.7 million domain registrations

Domain Market Share

The market share for .com is around 72.90%
.net has a market share of 6.62%
.org has a market share of 5.02%
Among new generic TLDs, .top had the highest market share of 1.74%
.online holds a market share of 0.65%
Russia’s .ru holds a 5.6% market share
Germany’s .de has the second biggest country-code TLD market share of 2.3%

Domain Name Registrars

GoDaddy has over 58 million domains registered
GoDaddy’s market share is around 16%
NameCheap has over 7 million registered domains
NameCheap’s market share is around 2.98%
In Canada, Tucows has over 9.5 million registered domains
Tucows holds 5.36% of market share
eNom has over 5.8 million registered domains
eNom holds 3.6% of market share
German-based 1&1 Internet (IONOS) has almost 5 million registered domains
1&1 holds a market share of 1.6%

TLDs by Country

China has almost 9 million registered new generic TLDs
3.6 million of China’s registered TLDs are with HiChina
14.04% of global generic TLDs are registered in the USA
6.02% of domains across the world are registered in Japan
Panama has over 2 million registered domains

Domains to be Aware of

.gdn has over 46,000 registered domains where 41,762 of them are malicious
75.5% of .work domains are considered spam
17,124 out of 21,774 .tokyo domains are bad domains
56.3% of .shop domains are malicious or spam
3,227 .ooo domains are considered dangerous

Interesting Domain Facts

.com is the most trusted TLD
.live is regularly used for news and blogs
.me is often used for personal blogs
.site launched in 2016 and had over 140,000 domain registrations in a single day
Google launched .dev TLD for developers in 2019
Elon Musk purchased the domain name Tesla.com for £8.73 million in 2016