Total registrations of Top Level Domains (TLDs) at 270 million – ccTLD market share increases

CENTR has published its latest stat report for December 2013. CENTR is the association of Internet Country Code Top Level Domain Registries such as .uk in the United Kingdom and .es in Spain. CENTR has 52 Full Members, 9 Associate Members and granted Observer status to 12 organisations. ‘CENTR’ members represent more than 95% of European ccTLDs in terms of domain registrations.

As at November 2013, the total number of registrations across all Top Level Domains (TLDs) stood at 270 million. This figure represents a growth of roughly 2.0% since August 2013 (or 5.3 million registrations) with the largest growth in found among ccTLDs at (3.8%).  sTLDs registrations have decreased over the quarter largely due to declines in the .asia TLD.

The market share of ccTLDs has been increasing against gTLDs in small increments over the year and has attained just over 45% as at November 2013.

                     Registrations        % Change  (3 month)

ccTLD          120,737,433           3.3%
ccTLD IDN   1,215,148               0.8%
gTLD            146,794,365           1.0%
sTLD            1,274,293               -5.6%
Total             270,021,239           2.0%

The top 20 largest ccTLDs represent roughly 82% of all ccTLD registrations globally and 37% of all domain name registrations.
Over this quarter, the top 20 list remains largely unchanged in terms of order except for .us which moved up 1 position growing over 3% for the quarter. The ccTLD for Tokelau (.TK) has the largest zone with now over 20 million reported domain names. It is important to note that .TK offer mostly free domains and is marketed at a global level, therefore operating a substantially different business model than traditional ccTLDs. From those found in the top 20 list, China (.cn) experienced the highest growth with just over 13%.

European ccTLDs closed November 2013 with 65.5 million registrations – net
growth of 1.3% over the past 3 months. In general ccTLDs and gTLDs have closely aligned growth rates. The largest contribution to the November 3-month growth rate was .ru adding almost 150K net domains. Over the past 12 months, European ccTLDs grew 5% as compared to 3.8% among global gTLDs.  Recently, and over the coming months, new gTLDs are being added to the root zone.  One might expect to see an effect on gTLD growth once the new gTLDs start registering domain names.

A large majority of the surveyed ccTLDs have a market share of more than 50% in
their country.  16 of the surveyed ccTLDs estimate their market share between 75% and 100%.