Quick: what's the most popular top-level domain? OK, that one was easy. But what about this one: How many of the world's most popular sites use the .com TLD? Pingdom found out.
First off, the company notes that of the approximately 200 million registered domain names, fewer than half are under the .com TLD. Pingdom decided to look at the dominance of the .com TLD from two perspectives: the top 10,000 websites in the world, and the top 10,000 websites in the U.S. The two groups of sites show quite different results.
For the top 10,000 sites worldwide, Pingdom used data from Alexa to find the following shares:
- .com: 61.8 percent
- .net: 5.8 percent
- .de: 3.3 percent
- .ru: 2.8 percent
- .org: 2.8 percent
- .jp: 2.6 percent
- .cn: 2.5 percent
- .uk: 1.2 percent
- .fr: 1.2 percent
- .it: 1.0 percent
- .br: 1.0 percent
- other: 14.0 percent
The TLDs in the “other” category include those with shares of less than 1 percent each.
Pingdom notes that country code TLDs have difficulty reaching the top of the worldwide list since they're so country specific. The company also notes that generic TLDs account for 71.8 percent of the total worldwide.
By zooming in on the U.S. in particular, Pingdom found the following ranking of TLDs, using data from Quantcast:
- .com: 83.3 percent
- .net: 4.6 percent
- .org: 3.7 percent
- .edu: 1.9 percent
- .gov: 1.6 percent
- other: 4.9 percent
Interestingly enough, the U.S.-specific .us TLD accounted for just 89 of the top 10,000 sites in the U.S., or less than 1 percent. Also, generic TLDs in the U.S. account for 95.7 percent of all TLDs.
Recently, ICANN, the Internet's ultimate domain authority, approved a proposal to offer internationalized domain names in Chinese script, in addition to a .xxx TLD for adult content. Both moves could shake up these TLD lists a bit in the future.
Sources:
http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/07/09/the-massive-dominance-of-com-charts/
http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/news/article.php/3890126/ICANN+Approves+Chinese-Language+Domains,+.XXX+TLD.htm
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20008838-93.html
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