Domain Tools hits 1 billion domains and shares some interesting statistics

A few weeks ago DomainTools added in its database its one billionth unique domain name.

Celebrating the unique occasion Domain Tools shared some very interesting and fun statistics about registration numbers and keywords:

For context, there are about 350 million domains in existence today. Meaning there are twice as many unique historic (deleted or expired and not re-registered currently) domains as there are domains in DNS today.

DomainTools has done a decent job of domain discovery and tracking over our 17 year history, so the one billion number is probably within 10% of the actual number. Regardless, we thought it would be fun to post a few statistics on the domains we’ve seen to-date. And to be clear, we are strictly talking about domains here, different from hostnames, subdomains, “websites” or whatever statistic this article was trying to convey 3 years ago:

    • Not surprisingly, .com has the most historic domains, with nearly 434 million that no longer exist.
    • For domains with at least 1000 current registrations, the gTLD with the highest percentage of deleted domains is .realty with almost 97% of ever-registered domains now deleted.
    • For domains with at least 1000 current registrations, the gTLD with the lowest percentage of deleted domains is .boston with only 0.3% of their 22,100 domains having ever been deleted and not re-registered.
    • From a ccTLD perspective, we have seen over 110 million domains from European countries, over 54 million from Oceanic countries, over 44 million from Asian countries, about 16 million from South American countries and over 12 million from African countries. How about North America? Only about 14 million, and half of that is Canada and Mexico. It’s still a .com world in the U.S.
    • Putting aside the nic.tld required registration for new gTLDs, the top 10 strings that exist in the most TLDs, each with over 700 registrations (ever), are:
      1. amazon
      2. bitcoin
      3. www
      4. whatsapp
      5. blockchain
      6. microsoft
      7. yahoo
      8. mail
      9. oculusrift
      10. google
    • Overall there are nearly 150 strings that have ever been registered in at least 500 TLDs, including fun ones like “iot”, “startup”, “hello”, “cannabis”, “the” and “matt”.
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About Konstantinos Zournas

I studied Computer Engineering and Computer Science in London, UK and I am now living in Athens, Greece. I went online in 1995, started coding in 1996 and began buying domain names and creating websites in 2000. I started the OnlineDomain.com blog in 2012.

5 comments

  1. I get some visits to my domains from Domain Tools servers, do they have bots that visit domains or is this someone searching my domain through Domain Tools?

  2. As a general observation on my own domains, visits from Domain Tools have had a significant increase lately. Also I’d say just from reading domain posts and articles in social media, that good domains seem to be seeing a trend of increased demand and importance. From end users and also domain investors probably trying to gain inventory because they see a rising future market.

  3. The .realty is such a niche domain extension, though I guess selling just one domain with that extension may be very profitable as realty is a high-profit business.

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