These are the TLD growers and shrinkers of 2024 (part one)
With all the excitement and concern surrounding the rise of artificial intelligence, the smart money might have been on .ai being the fastest-growing ccTLD in 2024. It wasn’t.
That honor instead goes to Russia’s .ru, which grew by the largest number of domains last year of any of the ccTLDs that have so far published statistics.
.ru grew by almost 388,000 domains to end the year at around 5,817,000, according to the registry. The matching Cyrillic ccTLD, .РФ, declined a little from 768,000 domains to 760,000.
Anguilla’s .ai, currently being re-homed on an Identity Digital back-end grew by just over 244,000 domains between late December 2023 and January 2 2025, according to registry stats.
After Russia, Indonesian ccTLD .id added the most domains in 2024, growing by almost 289,000 and breaking into seven figures in November to end the year with about 1,215,000 names.
Turkiye’s .tr is next on the list. Its second-level liberalization saw a sharp increase in registrations mid-year, and it ended the year with 1.283.000 names, up 271,000 over the period.
Portugal and Brazil (.pt and .br) are the only other two ccTLDs to report six-figure increases so far, with growth of 149,000 and 134,000 to 1,930,000 and 5,372,000 domains respectively.
.fr (France), .ir (Iran), .pl (Poland), .de (Germany), .my (Malaysia), .ca (Canada), .vn (Vietnam), .jp (Japan), .cz (Czechia) and .hu (Hungary) all reported growth measured in the five digits for the year.
At the other end of the table, the UK saw the biggest shrinkage in terms of registered domains in 2024, with .uk (second and third levels combined) down about 472,000 to end December at 10,261,000 domains.
The decline was primarily at the third level (such as the popular .co.uk), which lost 371,000 names compared to 100,000 at the second level. The third-level total is now 8,967,852 — below nine million for the first time in 15 years.
The ccTLD reporting the second-biggest loss was .nl, which lost 106,000 names to end the year with 6,192,000. The TLD has been on a downwards trajectory since its peak of 6.3 million domains in mid-2023.
Ukraine’s up next, reporting a 57,000-name decline to 458,000 at the end of December. Much as it’s hard to not speculate that international sanctions are behind the rise of .ru, one wonders whether the ongoing Russian invasion is not behind the decline of .ua. Entrepreneurial-aged men have more existential concerns right now.
.ar (Argentina), .dk (Denmark), .kr (South Korea), .at (Austria), .se (Sweden), .eu (European Union), .be (Belgium) and .nu (Niue, mainly sold in Sweden) all saw five-figure declines in their reg totals over the year.
.hk (Hong Kong), .cl (Chile), .it (Italy), .il (Israel), .mx (Mexico) and .ie (Ireland) all also saw modest dips in their totals.
About three quarters of the ccTLDs for which I have data were up in the year, with the rest going down.
I should note that this prose league table cannot be considered comprehensive. Many ccTLD registries with substantial DUM (eg China, the US) will not report their year-end numbers for months and others (eg .tv, .co, .in, .me) typically do not report numbers at all.
In addition, strict apples-to-apples comparisons between ccTLDs may not be fair, given the differing ways registries calculate their totals.
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We are writing to you on behalf of .PT, the registry responsible for managing the Portuguese top-level domain .pt. We’ve noticed that the registration data for .pt reported by Domain Incite appears to be inaccurate. There’s a discrepancy of approximately 149,000 reported versus the actual figure of 145,003. As you can check here: https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.pt.pt/pt/estatisticas/?subm=0&type=3&graph=0__;!!IfJP2Nwhk5Z0yJ43lA!KQFN36MSesPk0KSyoe6xYpe20IZ1GIzJjPzIoZZJQxXY4uSJp_X3dWp3qloxk36zQvKUSb3zw51syBP-bRT1muC3dPU6GTHz$
We would be grateful if you could kindly correct this data at your earliest convenience to ensure the accuracy of the information published.