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From Tuesday, July 9th, 2013: http://domainnamewire.com/2013/07/09/which-tlds-have-the-most-popular-web-sites/
Which TLDs have the most popular web sites?
Another way to evaluate the success of a top level domain.
As new top level domains start rolling off the assembly line in the coming months, there are a number of metrics we’ll consider to analyze how well they’re doing.
Domains under management (total domains) will be a key metric. The registries will care more about revenue, particularly if they charge more than other domains or sell a lot of premium domains. For some domains, fuzzy numbers around how well they serve the community will be considered.
Another way to look at the overall health of a TLD is to see how many registrants are creating successful sites using the TLD.
A ready source of data for this is Alexa’s list of top million sites. I cross-referenced the number of domains in yesterday’s Alexa top million list with the number of registered domains across the 12 TLDs that report monthly numbers to ICANN and have more than 50,000 registrations.
The numbers are interesting:
The middle column shows the number of sites for the top level domain that rank in Alexa’s top million. The right column shows how many domains per 1,000 registered for the TLD are in Alexa’s top million.
Yes, there are a bunch of holes you can poke in data like this. It’s not very meaningful for .tel since you can create web sites on .tel, for example. Perhaps the gross number of domains in the top million is more relevant, although that doesn’t take into consideration the niche nature of some TLDs.
Nonetheless, I think it’s another interesting way to cut the data.
ccTLDs are a bit harder to track because finding total registration numbers is hard. Interestingly, .gr (Greece), .jp (Japan), and .ru (Russia) have the highest rankings overall, well ahead of .com.
