August 20, 2018
Verisign's latest Domain Name Industry Brief indicates Australia's .au has dropped out of the list of top 10 country code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs).
The latest Brief says 339.8 million domain names were registered across all top-level domains (TLDs) at the end of Q2 this year, representing growth of approximately 7.9 million, or 2.4 percent, year over year.
The .com extension continues to rule the roost, with a base totaling approximately 135.6 million registrations as at June 30, 2018. Out of all TLDs, next in line was China's .cn, with 22.7 million domains.
In terms of country code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs), Australia's .au once featured regularly in the top ten (just) but isn't on Verisign's leaderboard for Q2. Those that were (in descending order of registrations):
It should be noted that while Tokelau is a tiny country, .tk names are provided free, hence it ranking so high in the list above.
Italy, at number 10, had 3.1 million .it names - and Australia's .au would not have been far behind.
In late June, registry operations for the .au domain name space were transferred to new operator Afilias. At that point, there were approximately 3.1 million Australian domain names registered. It may be that Australia could have scraped in, but official figures couldn't be provided at the time of compiling the report as the dust from .au transfer activity was yet to settle. However, Verisign doesn't state this to be the case in its report.
Total ccTLD domain name registrations were approximately 149.7 million at the end of the second quarter, increasing by approximately 5.5 million registrations, or 3.8 percent, year over year.
New gTLD (ngTLD) domain name registrations reached approximately 21.8 million at the end of June, a decrease of approximately 2.5 million, or 10.4 percent, year over year. All the various ngTLD now floating about the place make up just 6.4% of all TLDs.
The latest Domain Name Industry Brief can be viewed in full here (PDF).
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