How many domain names will there be in the world in 2024?
The 2024 Internet extensions ranking establishes the number of domain names worldwide.
There are two main families of Internet TLDs: generic TLDs under the supervision of ICANN, and TLDs associated with geographical territories. Within each group, there are also categorizations such as “legacy TLDs” and “nTLDs”.
Our ranking lists all Internet extensions with more than one million registered domain names.
In June 2024, Verisign’s Domain Name Brief Industry counted 362.5 million registered domain names.
This worldwide figure is 1.6% higher than for the same period in 2023.
.COM in decline by 2024
Since our previous ranking of 2023 Internet domains, .COM domain names have been on the decline. They have fallen below the symbolic 160 million mark.
While .COM retains a majority market share (43.5%) of the total number of domain names worldwide, its decline is historic.
Breakdown between .COM and other Internet extensions
The successive increases in the price of .COM since 2021 are surely one explanation for this drop in the stock of .COM domain names.
The geopolitical context, particularly with Russia and China, is also a possible reason for this significant decrease.
Growing country-code domains like France’s .FR
In its annual report on the global domain name market, published in July 2024, AFNIC noted an increase in “ccTLDs” of over +3.0% between 2022 and 2023.
Another study on .FR published in March 2024 confirms that France is playing its part in this growth, with an average of 3.4% in 2023 for .FR.
Nevertheless, .FR remains 12th in Solidnames’ ranking of 2024 Internet extensions.
Which extensions are driving the number of domain names worldwide?
The top 5 changes slightly with the arrival of .ORG (up slightly) in fifth place, replacing .CO.UK and .UK English (down slightly).
In addition, Russian extensions have gained almost a million domain names in one year. The Russian .RU thus takes 7th place to the Dutch .NL.
In the rest of the world, India passes the 3 million domain name mark. There are now 21 extensions with as many names registered, compared with 20 last year.
In the United States, the threshold of 2 million .US domain names has been passed.
There has also been strong growth in the marketed .CC extension. Operated by Verisign, the Cocos Islands extension is not sold as such. It climbed from 43rd place to 34th this year, the second-best increase.
Another dynamic country is Turkey. After opening .COM.TR in 2022, the country gave everyone access to domain names directly in .TR in September 2024. Under these conditions, Turkey moved up 5 places. What’s more, 13% of Turkish domain names are already directly in .TR.
All-time statistical record for new Internet extensions
The biggest rise in our rankings comes from .SHOP. The “nTLD” rises from 24th to 13th place. With 3.7 million domain names, .SHOP is closing in on .XYZ (4.2 million), the leader in this category of new Internet extensions.
The number of domain names worldwide is impacted by the dynamism of nTLDs.
For the1st time in their history, more than 40 million domain names have been registered in the nTLDs. This figure has been rising steadily since the summer of 2021, when 25 million domain names were registered in all nTLDs.
There are seven nTLDs with more than one million registered domain names. VIP is back in our rankings, having already been present in 2020.
CFD, a millionaire in 2023, has dropped out of the rankings. It still has 660,000 domain names. There are also 18 nTLDs with more than 500,000 domain names.
Inexpensive nTLDs popular for abuse
These statistical successes can be partly explained by an aggressive pricing policy, particularly in the first year of registration.
In France, for example, a domain name can be purchased from OVH for €1.49 excluding VAT for the first year. As a result, some nTLDs attract fraudsters who use these cheap domain names for their scams.
This is also reflected in the renewal rate of certain nTLDs. The renewal rate for .TOP domain names is 18.50%, compared with 83% for an established and serious extension like .FR.
It’s possible that the disappearance of the sulphurous Freenom registry has something to do with the over-representation of abuse in certain low-cost nTLDs.
As a reminder, Freenom offered free domain names in certain African country extensions, as well as in .TK for Tokelau. In 2018 or 2019, .TK counted almost 20 million domain names, placing this extension 3rd worldwide.
Other countries followed (e.g. .CF Central African Republic, .GA Gabon, .GQ Equatorial Guinea, .ML Mali…), gaining millions of domain names but surely losing their digital sovereignty.
2024 marks the end of this model, which does the domain name industry no credit. The last free millionaire extensions of 2023, .CF and .TK, have finally left this year’s rankings.
Who will be the new millionaire extensions in 2025?
Indonesia and its .ID are closing in on the million mark, with 983,000 domain names at the time of writing.
Anguilla’s .AI has already passed the half-million mark. The success of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has changed life in this British overseas territory in the Eastern Caribbean.
Just this month, the local government signed an agreement with Identity Digital to further develop this landmark extension. As a reminder, Identity Digital already operates over 300 nTLDs, which are part of the GlobalBlock program.
Finally, we would like to remind you that this ranking of the number of domain names worldwide only includes Internet extensions. NFT domain names registered in Web3-type extensions are therefore not taken into account.
These blockchain-based extensions are dominated by.ETH, which has two million domain names registered.
Ranking of 2024 millionaire Internet extensions