According to a recently published Verisign report, as of the end of 2016 there were around 329.3 million domain names registered on the Internet. This number is almost 6 million lowers than for the first six months of 2016, and the problem is not the decline in interest towards the domains. Domain Incite draws attention to the fact that the main reason for the drop was the change in the number of domains registered in .TK.
This domain is technically the ccTLD of Tokelau, an island country in the Pacific Ocean, dependent territory of New Zealand. However, the Freenom registry that manages the domain is giving the names for free to anyone. This is why domain .TK is one of the largest in the world and till recently was the biggest among ccTLDs (even though it is a ccTLD only technically). According to the independent analytical company Zooknic, in the end of 2014 there were around 25 million names registered in .TK. However, Freenom doesn’t provide any official data on the number of registered names in .TK. During the last several years the data from Zooknic was used for the reports.
In the third quarter of last year experts at Zooknic revised their estimation. According to them, there are around 18.4 million names registered in .TK. This is why the total number of domain names in the world that was shown in the Verisign report has lowered. Moreover, if the estimation of Zooknic is correct, .TK is not the largest ccTLD in the world anymore, giving way to the ccTLD of China - .CN.
