The Council of European National TLD Registries (CENTR) has published a regular report covering basic domain name statistics with a focus on European ccTLDs (country code Top Level Domains). It includes statistics for the period from March 13, 2013 to February 14, 2014.
The largest ccTLD (22.2% of the total) is Tokelau (.TK), three tropical coral atolls in the South Pacific Ocean governed by New Zealand. “It is important to note that .TK offers mostly free domains on a global level and gets its revenue based on a fundamentally different business model than traditional ccTLDs,” the report reads.
The runner-up is Germany’s .DE (15.7%), while China’s .CN grew the most, by 16.5%, from November 2013 to February 2014. Russia’s .RU country code domain ranks sixth in the world with 4.9% of registrations, and fourth in Europe, after .DE (Germany), .UK (Britain) and .NL (the Netherlands). At the same time .РФ is the largest of the domain names using non-Latin characters, known as internationalized domain names or IDNs. It has 851,535 registrations, which is over 10 times more than the Swedish .SE domain (77,598 registrations).
A few more interesting facts: .BY (Belarus) achieved the highest quarterly growth in Europe, at 5.7% from November 2013 to February 2014. Liechtenstein, a country with only 37,000 people, retained the top position, with 173 ccTLDs per 100 people. The figures for Germany and Britain are 19 and 17 ccTLDs, respectively.
