European registry EURid with support from UNESCO and Verisign has published a 2015 version of a report on the development of Internationalized Domain Names. The document displays the data only from the beginning of the year, but it contains a lot of interesting information. In particular, the total number of IDNs (top-level and second level) is estimated at 6.2 million. Thus, IDNs’ share in the total number of domain names on the Internet as last year is 2%.
The main codes used in IDNs are ASCII (Latin script), Cyrillic and Han (Chinese). They accounted for 90% of all internationalized domains. 70% of all IDNs are so-called “hybrid” domains. These are second level domains, registered in traditional generic top-level domains that use ASCII code (for example, .COM or .NET). Thus, “pure” internationalized domains (in national domain zones or new gTLDs with a different coding system, not ASCII) amount to 30% of their total number.
Talking about a real usage of internationalized names and not only the number of registrations, we notice that Russian domain .РФ is one of the leaders. A share of active domains is 57% with “parked” domains and 36% - without them. The report also ascertains that Russian language is one of the main languages of the content associated with internationalized domains.
