Domain Incite, a respected industry news blog, has begun a series of publications to review the results of 2024. The first story is dedicated to national top-level domains. With all the popularity of and excitement about artificial intelligence, many expected Anguilla’s .AI to show the best results. Indeed, this ccTLD indicated an impressive growth, adding about 244,000 registrations over the year.
However, it was not the uncontested leader at the end of 2024. Instead, that honor went to Russia’s .RU, which added almost 381,000 names and ended the year with 5,819,288 registrations. Russia was followed by Indonesia’s .ID, which grew by 289,000 registrations, bringing the total number of registered names to more than 1,215,000. The third place went to Turkiye’s .TR, with its 271,000 new registrations and a total of 1,283,000 names last year.
This put Anguilla’s ccTLD in the fourth line of this makeshift “league table.” In addition to the TLDs above, only two more showed an increase of 100,000 or more registrations – Portugal’s .PT and Brazil’s .BR.
At the lower end of the table, .UK saw the biggest decline in terms of registered domains in 2024, ending the year with 10,261,000 names and losing about 472,000. Incidentally, the shrinkage occurred primarily at the third level (such as the popular .CO.UK), which lost 371,000 names. The third-level total is now below nine million (8,967,852) for the first time in 15 years.
The number of registrations in the Dutch ccTLD .NL also decreased significantly, by 106,000. It ended the year with 6,192,000 registered names.
It should be noted, however, that the picture painted by the above statistics is hardly comprehensive. The registries of many top ccTLDs, such as China’s .CN or the United States’ .US, do not publish their figures for months, while the highly popular .CO (Colombia), .IN (India) or .ME (Montenegro) ccTLDs do not report any statistics at all.
