December 10, 2018
According to Verisign's latest Domain Name Industry Brief, .au domains still remain in the top ten of the world's ccTLDs.
Here's how the country leaderboard looked at the end of Q3, 2018.
1. .CN (China) - 22.7 million
2. .TK (Tokelau) - 21.5 million
3. .DE (Germany) - 16.2 million
4. .UK (United Kingdom) - 11.9 million
5. .RU (Russian Federation) - 5.9 million
6. .NL (Netherlands) 5.8 million
7. .BR (Brazil) 4.0 million
8. .EU (European Union) 3.8 million
9. .FR (France) 3.2 million
10. .AU (Australia) 3.2 million
.AU's total at the end of September* works out to be approximately one domain name for every eight Australians. On a per capita basis we stack up pretty well against the leader, China, which has one name for every 61 citizens. However, the Germans outpace us on a per capita basis with one domain for every five inhabitants.
Tokelau's per capita rate blasts away everyone, with 14,342 domains for every person! How is this so? the .TK extension is a special case - it is open to registration for all and registrations are free.
However, because .TK is offered for free it has suffered some image problems in the past - more on that here. The .TK extension is currently ranked no.5 on Spamhaus's 10 most abused top level domains list, so given these issues it may not be the best choice Australian businesses to register use in connection with a commercial enterprise. It could be best to stick with registering a .com.au domain as .au has a high level of awareness and trust, locally and globally.
Looking at the bigger picture, Verisign's report states the third quarter of this year wrapped up with around 342.4 million domain name registrations across all top-level domains, an increase of approximately 2.6 million registrations, or 0.8 percent, compared to the second quarter of 2018. Q3's total represented growth of approximately 11.7 million, or 3.5 percent, year over year.
The latest Verisign Domain Name Industry Brief can be viewed here.
* At the time of writing, au Domain Administration (auDA) notes 3,170,688 .au domains registered.
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