It’s been almost 26 years since the first ever internet web page went online. In the meantime, more than 314 million domains have been registered worldwide, according to April 2016’s Verisign Domain Report. The internet industry continues to record steady growth, with an increase in domains of 9% compared to the same period in 2015. Domain endings have changed over the years as well. The classics like .info or .com dominated the early period of the internet, but this meant that all of the best website addresses were snapped up. Today, there are more top-level domains (TLDs) on offer than ever before, including .beauty, .dance, or .chicago.
Despite these increases, .com remains the most popular ending worldwide: Around 123 million domains are registered with the .com TLD. So which domain endings are in pursuit? As mentioned above, the country code .cn is has slightly more than Germany, at close to 17 million domains. It would make sense for China to have the highest number of country-specific top-level domains in the world, given that it has the highest population of any country, with over 1.38 billion people residing there.
But, strangely, it’s only second place in the Verisign list of top country domain endings, and third across all top-level domains. .tk, the country-specific domain ending for Tokelau, is used by over 31 million websites worldwide. Given that Tokelau’s population is around 1,400, and the island group owned by New Zealand was ranked lowest in the world for purchasing power parity by the CIA in their 2015 publication ‘The World Factbook’. So how exactly does such a small, poor, remote part of the world wind up being the second most popular top-level domain of choice worldwide?