According to a recently published report by Verisign, at the end of last year there were 329.3 million registered domains operating in the global cyberspace. Addresses with the .com extension hold the largest market share, while websites from China took second place, with record growth compared to 2016.
The role of the digital face of businesses around the world is growing, as evidenced by the results of the calculation prepared by Verisign – as many as 21 million new internet addresses were added over the year. This trend did not bypass Poland either, where in 2016, according to an NASK analysis, a new website with the .pl extension was registered every half a minute. At the end of last year, their number reached 2.7 million.
There are still the most sites with the .com extension – according to this year's edition of the summary, there are exactly 126.9 million of them, which means they account for nearly 40% of all global websites. An address ending in .com will certainly continue to be characterized by the largest share of the global website market, not least because this extension allows a site to achieve the greatest reach. It should be expected that the number of .com services registered also by Polish companies will continue to grow – one only needs to look at the rising statistics of Polish exports – including IT services, which generates demand for a global domain – explains Rafał Kuśmider from dhosting.pl.
A flood of sites from the Middle Kingdom
China's economy grew by nearly 7% over the past year, taking into account data on the growth in the value of its GDP. This is not a surprising result, however, when compared with the indicator's value in 2007, when it was over 14%, or in 2010, when it exceeded 10%. What is certainly worth noting, however, is the scale of growth in new websites with the .cn extension. Against the backdrop of other national domains, Chinese addresses increased at the fastest rate – at the end of 2016, Verisign experts recorded 21.1 million of them, which allows the Middle Kingdom to take second place in the global ranking. A year earlier, there were "only" 16.4 million of them.
Third place? The Tokelau Archipelago
This is not a joke – 18.7 million domains, more than those from Germany, the United Kingdom, Russia, or the Netherlands, come from the Tokelau archipelago in the Pacific Ocean, with a population of just over 1,300. A year earlier, there were even more addresses with the .tk extension than those registered in China.
The reason? As is easy to guess, the cause of this state of affairs is cost, or rather the lack thereof. It is all due to the unique operating model of this territory, initiated by Danish entrepreneur Joost Zuurbier, which allows websites with the .tk ending, pointing to one's own server or IP address, to be registered absolutely for free.
Websites increasingly "target" social media and e-commerce
One of the statistics included in the Verisign report is the growth of web addresses with the .com and .net extensions that redirect visitors to social media and e-commerce services. In the case of Instagram, their number increased by as much as 81%, while Amazon gained 41% new redirects, LinkedIn and YouTube 23%, and Facebook – 20%.
