For a number of years, Germany (.de) was the world’s most popular ccTLD in terms of registrations.
But about two years ago China made its ccTLD a lot more affordable and easier to get. Since then, the country has been registering roughly 20,000 country codes a day. The country went from 2 million registrations to 10 million registrations in an amazing 12 months.
Within the past two months, China overtook Germany for the top spot, with approximately 11.4 million registrations. It’s safe to say that Germany isn’t going to take that lead back.
The country that stands the best chance of one day giving China a run for its money is India. But I’m not holding my breath. India stands at only 1.2 million registrations currently and is growing at 46% annually. It’s an impressive growth rate — a rate that is bound to increase, but China is also adding registrations at a good clip.
Why isn’t .us higher on the list? Blame .com. Most Americans assume .com is synonymous with USA. Over time, I expect this to change, but that’s a topic for a future post…
8 responses
John – welcome to blog.webcertain.com! For those who don’t know John, he’s one of the foremost globalisation experts and is a welcome addition to the Webcertain team. We’ll get that picture sorted too John!
I am in the process of launching translations.cn to offer our services.
That’s a great post, thank you. Congratulations to China. To be precise .CN now is 12,264,615 and .DE 12,224,797 but Chinese domain names are growing faster so soon the gap will increase!
I was actually just going through Verisign’s report for September 2008. This document can be viewed at http://www.verisign.com/static/044191.pdf . The stats differ, slightly, but there is a difference. I wanted to know what could be the reason for this difference in accumulated stats. I would be glad to get a response.
Hi Leroy,
I suspect you’re talking about Verisign’s stats which say that .DE still leads. .CN in total number. China’s regulatory body disputes this: http://www.cnnic.cn/html/Dir/2008/07/31/5247.htm and the Verisign report doesn’t include detailed numbers on the ccTLD stats. But if in fact .DE is still in the lead, it’s still safe to say that this lead will only be short term. It’s a numbers game and China has many more potential registrants and Germany — and less than a third of its population even have Internet access still.
If you come across more data in this regard please let me know!
JY
Hey that sounds great. we will do our best to get back to no 1 🙂
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It is of course….and it will still grow. Just look at the population figures and you will know that these guys will rule the world soon