On April 7, 2018, the Russian national top-level domain, .RU, marked its 24th anniversary. As of now, the domain hosts 5.2 million second-level domain names and ranks fifth in the world among ccTLDs and ninth among all top-level domains.
The domain is living a full life: on average, 4,500 domain names are registered in .RU daily, and 4.5 million domain names (86.5 percent of all registered domain names) are in active use. Fifty-five percent of them host websites, 11.5 percent are used only for email, while five percent of active domain names are redirected to other websites.
Interestingly, 31 percent of domain names in .RU are older than five years, while 31 percent are less than a year old.
The number of domain name administrators has grown by over 70,000 in the past year. In all, .RU now has over 2 million administrators, of which 45,000 (2 percent) own 10 or more names, and 1.55 million administer one domain name (75 percent of all administrators in .RU).
The .RU domain and Russia’s second national domain, .РФ, are highly popular among Russians. Thus, 78 percent of domain names registered by Russian citizens belong to .RU and .РФ, while only two percent of domain names administered by Russian residents belong to other national domains. Some six percent of domain names are registered by Russians in new gTLDs and 14 percent in traditional gTLDs.
Director of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ Andrey Vorobyev congratulated all Russian users on .RU’s anniversary and spoke about the prospects for the national domain’s development. “I am happy to congratulate you on the anniversary of the national domain .RU. It is not a secret that last year, both .RU and .РФ showed a decline because of the “cleaning” measures in our domain zones. We took measures to eliminate the unused domain names, and some of the domain investors decided not to renew the registration of some domain names in their portfolio. At the same time, the growth rate of new domain names, for instance in .RU, remains very high,” he said.
