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By Ron Jackson
We
started tracking .US domain registrations on July
1, 2021 in preparation for the launch of the American
Domain Names website that followed on July 4 (yes, our
one-year anniversary) is almost here)! One year ago at this
time, 1,691,304 .US domain has been registered. As of
today, that number has jumped by 153,449 domains - an
annual growth rate of 9.1% (you can see the month by
month progression on our Sales
& Stats page).
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To
put that number into perspective you can check out how the
.US growth rate compares to the market for all TLDs
combined, as well as individual categories likes .com
and all ccTLDs, by looking at the information in the
latest Verisign
Domain Name Industry Brief (.pdf file)
that DNJournal.com
broke down today. The new Verisign report covers the opening
quarter of the year and includes both quarter to quarter and
year over year comparisons. At the end of 1Q-2022, the total
number of domains registered in all TLDs worldwide
was 350.5 million. That was 13.2 million more
than one year earlier - an annual growth rare of 3.9%.
The .com TLD alone outperformed the market with a
4.3% growth rate (based on adding 6.7 million
domains to bring the .com total to 161.3 million).
Those are both healthy percentage increases, numbers so it
is encouraging to see .US growing at an even faster
clip.
The
9.1% gain for America's ccTLD (country code
domain) is even more impressive when you compare it to the
rate for all of the world's ccTLDs combined (every
nation has their own ccTLD). 133.4 million country
code domains were registered worldwide at the end of 1Q-2022
(not far from the total number of .com registrations). As a
whole the ccTLD category grew 2.4% year over year
(and it really started coming on strong in the opening
quarter of this year when that rate doubled to 4.7%
after 6 million domains were added in 1Q-2022
alone).
While
it is gaining ground, .US still has a lot of room left to
grow. It is far from being the biggest ccTLD in total
registrations, a situation that resulted from most of the
the world's other ccTLDs getting a 17-year head start.
Though .US was launched as the very first ccTLD on
the Internet on February 15, 1985, it was not
made available to all U.S. citizens (and those doing
business with the U.S.) until April 24, 2002! Prior
to that the TLD was reserved for use by government agencies,
law enforcement, schools and a handful of other entities. In
the meantime, between 1985 and 2002, .com grew into the
omnipresent global TLD it continues to be. However, since
2002, the Internet has also grown exponentially. Back
them only about 25 million .com domains were registered.
Today, as we noted, that number is over 160 million.
That's why so many new TLDs were created to meet the demand
for short, memorable domains. As the official TLD for
the world's biggest economy, more and more people,
especially in America's small to medium sized businesses,
are seeing .US as one of the best possible options for their
internet identity.
Posted
July 1, 2022. Permalink for this story:
https://www.adn.us/news-views/2022/0701.htm
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