367.3 million domain name registrations across all top level domains
As expected the .com registrations continued to increase despite Covid. At Dotwhat we have also experienced a larger interest in .com domains, both as new registrations but also in the after sales market where the prices have increased a lot. The .com and .net TLDs had a combined increase of 8.5 million domain name registrations, or 5.2%, year over year. New .com and .net domain name registrations totaled 11.7 million at the end of the second quarter of 2021. Total country-code TLD (ccTLD) domain name registrations were 157.7 million at the end of the second quarter of 2021 and the total new gTLD (ngTLD) domain name registrations were 22.9 million at the end of the second quarter of 2021. There is still not a big interest in the ngTLDs. It is very seldom that we see any of the big companies using the new gTLDs for anything in regards to marketing or websites.
It might be surprising to some to see .tk so high up on the list of ccTLDs with a base of 24.7 million making it the third largest domain in the world, but this domain is free so everyone can register the domain at no charge. Unfortunately this might also be the reason why it was identified as one of the major sources of phishing emails which we wrote about last week in our blog post . Even though the .tk domain is owned by a Dutch company, most of the phishing emails are actually coming from China according to the Global Phishing Report.