When Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web nearly 20 years, it’s very likely that he had at least some envisioning of exactly how pivotal it would be in revolutionizing the world of information dissemination. Whether or not he foresaw just how integral it would be become to the worlds of business and commerce might not be so easy to assume, but of course here we are today in the middle of 2019 and it’s as clear as ever that businesses – any business – that doesn’t have a strong online presence is going to be at a MAJOR disadvantage.
While we’re obviously in the business of being a reputable Canadian web hosting provider, here at 4GoodHosting just because we’re in ‘the biz’ doesn’t mean that we’re any less sensitive to the demands of what it takes to have good, strong Internet marketing. After all, nowadays well over half of all business is generated – either directly (online purchasing) or indirectly (direct referral) – via the web.
That of course won’t come as a surprise to anyone, or it shouldn’t. It’s summertime now, so let’s say you’re in the market to buy an air conditioner for your often-too-hot condo. Do you start comparing products and prices with visits to retailers in person? Of course not, you may end up buying that product in person, but you’re going to do your researching and comparison online. We could go on further about all of this, but likely enough said.
However, as if we didn’t need any more convincing of this – it appears that the first half of 2019 has seen more domain registrations overall worldwide than during the entire year 2018. Talk about an explosion!
351M+ & Counting
That’s right, the number of domain name registrations for the first quarter of 2019 reached 351.8 million across all top-level domains (TLDs). All in comparison to the 4th quarter of 2018 which closed with a total of 348.7 million domain registrations for the entire year. For those not as swift with numbers in their head as others (myself included), that’s an increase of 3.1 million, and just so far this year. With the trend being that domain name registrations have grown by 5.4 per cent year over year, they’re on pace to pretty much obliterate that standard pace.
Popular Choices
Not surprisingly, it’s been the .com and .net domain extensions that are being snapped up most enthusiastically. Between the two there was 154.8 million domain name registrations over the first quarter of 2019, an increase of 1.8 million domain name registrations (1.2%) for the same period of 2018. This also works out to a combined increase of 6.5 million domain name registrations (4.4%) year over year.
As March 31, 2019 came to an end, no less than 141 million something .com domain names were registered, while .net domain names totalled 13.8 million domain name. Between both of them there were only 153 million new domain registrations through the end of 2018.
Country-Specifics Domain
Now China may identify itself as a Communist country (and indeed the way it represses digital communications via the Internet is regime-ish, but that’s a topic for another day), but there’s not debate that the inner workings of it are decidedly capitalist / commerce-oriented. 5 billion people makes for one heck of an expensive labour force AND consumer base. As such it’s no surprise that the largest number of country-code TLDs registered for 2019 so far have been for .cn domains.
The exact number of them? A whopping 156.8 million!
The ccTLD that comes in second, however, is almost certainly going to come as a surprise. The Tokelau Islands are found in the South Pacific, and have a population of about 1,500 people. It has to come as a shock that 22.5 million .tk domains have been registered so far in 2019! I’ll be inclined to look into why this is, and perhaps I’ll share what I’ve dug up in a future blog post here.
Back on topic though, the rest of the ccTLDs came in as follows:
- .de (Germany) 16.2 million
- .uk (Great Britain) 12.0 million
- .tw (Taiwan) 5.9 million
- .nl (Netherlands) 5.9 million
- .ru (Russia) 5.8 million
- .br (Brazil) 4.0 million
- .eu (European union) 3.7 million
- .fr (France) 3.3 million
Seriously though, what’s the deal with Tokelau? I’ve spend the last 5 minutes scouring the web and nothing to explain why 22.5 million domains have been registered for an island nation of 1,500 people.
Decline in gTLD Domain Registrations
A gTLD is a generic top-level domain and, in contrast to the explosion of the types of domain registrations pointed out above, registrations of these types of domains have actually decreased their pace so far this years as compared to the same period of 2018.
Total domain registrations for new gTLDs were 23 million in the first quarter of 2019. Registrations for these types of domains have decreased by 3.4%, compared to last quarter of 2018, where they numbered approximately 23.8 million.
Anyways, the long and short of this is that more and more businesses, ventures, and individuals are getting onboard given the proven-effective nature of making you, your business, you art – whatever it may be – explicitly visible to the entire world.
As the expression goes - if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
