As the year comes to an end, here we take a look at a bunch of statistics, studies and reports relating to domain names that were published over the past twelve months.
Insights About The .AU Domain
A report published by the AusRegistry in April this year noted that there are nearly 29 million .au domains in total and this ccTLD has grown at a rate of six percent annually. This places the .AU among the top 10 most popular country codes in the world. The report included a number of other interesting facts:
-
50 percent of .AU domains are between 9 to 15 characters long
40 percent of all the .AU domains are registered for a period between 2 to 6 years
Domain names registered for at least 6 years are at least 80 percent likely to be renewed again
New South Wales has the largest number of registrations – just under 1 million
Trust In DNS Increases
A baseline study commissioned by the ICANN found that the overall trust in the Domain Name System (DNS) has increased this year. Participants in the survey showed an increase in awareness of the generic top level domains (gTLD). Generic TLD refers to the likes of .com, .net, .org, .info and .biz. Here are other interesting takeaways from the study.
-
52 percent of respondents were aware of at least one gTLD
The increase in awareness of strikingly high in North America where the awareness grew by nine percentage points from 29% in 2015 to 38% in 2016
95% of participants were aware of .COM, 88% knew .NET and 83% claimed to be aware of .ORG
Participants in the survey also said that they trusted these gTLDs. 91% claimed that websites with these TLDs were trustworthy destinations.
A significant chunk of participants believed in restricting domain name registration of these gTLDs to increase trust. 70% of the participants preferred one form of restriction or the other.
VeriSign Study Of The Domain Name Industry
According to a report published by Verisign, there were nearly 334.6 million domain names registered across all the top level domains by the close of the second quarter of 2016. That is an increase of nearly 7.9 million domain names just in the second quarter of 2016 alone. On a year-on-year basis, there has been a growth of 12.9 percent. In terms of popularity, .COM rules with over 125 million domains registered. This is followed by .TK, .CN, .DE, .NET and .ORG in that order. Other TLDs in the top 10 list include .UK, .XYZ, .RU and .NL. The two top gTLDs – .COM and .NET together account for nearly 143.2 million registrations – that’s a 7.3% increase YoY. Among ccTLDs, the bottom of the top 10 list include .BR, .EU, .AU and .FR.
The report had other interesting facts. Among the .COM domains, the top trending keywords were ‘research’, ‘bot’, ‘worlds’, ‘gram’ and ‘prince’. Other keywords like ‘vibe’, ‘tesla’, ‘poke’, ‘mosquito’ and ‘brexit’ also made the top 10 list. For .NET, the list comprised of keywords like ‘net’, ‘research’, ‘work’, ‘csgo’, ‘tshirt’, ‘medicine’, ‘prince’, ‘gram’, ‘hearing’ and ‘forums’.
Internet Growth Affected By Lack Of Domains?
An interesting study published in the Journal of Real Estate Finance & Economics, the lack of a valuable set of word combinations in domain names might be stifling the growth of the internet. Based on statistical modeling analysis, the study finds that an estimate for domain name demand not met by the current set of word combinations could be as much as 25% of all registered internet domains. The study focused on the real estate professionals and compared domain name availability with the commonality of surnames as according to the US census data and found that increasing the length of a surname from 6 to 7 characters helps reduce the demand for registrations by a whopping 24%.