Pingdom recently came up with a statistic of the domain name industry for 2008 and Internet numbers for 2008. Fantastic analysis on the subject which triggered me to ponder what will happen in the next 5 years generally for ccTLD and gTLD. Moreover, the first round gTLD submission is expected to be open Q1 09.

Let me re-quote some important numbers:-

Internet Users 2008

Internet Users

• 1,463,632,361 – The number of Internet users worldwide (June 2008).
• 578,538,257 – Internet users in Asia.
• 384,633,765 – Internet users in Europe.
  
• 248,241,969 – Internet users in North America.
• 139,009,209 – Internet users in Latin America/Caribbean.
• 51,065,630 – Internet users in Africa.
• 41,939,200 – Internet users in the Middle East.
• 20,204,331 – Internet users in Oceania/Australia.

Domain names for the past 3 years

Growth trends for the past 3 years

Let me go over some of the interesting points :-

• China (CNNIC) is the lead contributor to such growth and immense size of domain name which is accumulated to 13,572,326 domain names registered and growing. (They broke the 14m mark this year).
• Russia had the fastest growth rate of 11% quarterly , followed by DENIC by 12,448,242 domain names.
• Argentina has about 1,767,273 as of Oct 08. (This is partially because domain name is fully subsidized by the government)
• ccTLD registry has begun slowly to grow larger than most of gTLDs except for .COM.
• .BIZ, .INFO , .ORG, and .NET although in the millions, is slowly losing it’s appeal.  Sad to say, domain name that is normally associated with the mention extension has always had a bad image and often associated with spam, phishing sites. I’m aware that PIR(The body that runs .ORG) is doing something about this. Read here and here and here.
• Countries have begun to start taking their ccTLD more serious especially established countries and some governments have begun to take initiatives to boost their ccTLD numbers.
• Internet users in Asia is the highest at the moment even if North America and Latin America sum up, they are still lacking quite a far bit behind.
• As reported in Verisign Domain Name Brief 2009, 12% of 90m of .com/.net has no websites and 24% has a single page site which means 36% of .com/.net 90m, sums about 32,400,000 domain names serves no site or only a single page site.

My predictions for the next 5 years would be (in no specific order):-

• Established country who posses strong Internet presence will continue to grow off the charts especially European countries.
• China will continue to be the largest ccTLD around if not, almost on par with .com. CNNIC currently only have 14m domain names where as the entire population in China is at 1,330,044,544. What CNNIC has now, is still a marginal of the mass population.
• Technology driven countries such as Korea and Japan will have a steady growth of domain names but marginal only.
• The moment new gTLD is released, .com domain name will continue to climb because of brand protection and internet users see as .com as the grandfather and defacto of extensions. But there is another opinion behind this which i’ll leave out for the moment.
• .BIZ, .INFO , .ORG, and .NET will continue to be where are they right now because new gTLDs will be more specific and market oriented, targeting only a specific set of users and users won’t see it’s necessary to purchase other gTLD extensions especially if they have to start purchasing names from their respective ccTLD and protecting it in .com as well.

I would love to know what you think, so please drop a comment or two

*Domain stats from Hosterstats , Images by Pingdom , Verisign Domain Name Brief 2009

** This post was suppose to be released during ICANN Mexico but my laptop crashed and i was left without a laptop for more than 1 week.