The New gTLD domain names have been available for a few years now. As you may know by know, I have done new gTLD research in the past because I’m generally interested in the New gTLDs from a marketing perspective. I’m not as interested in them from a domain investor perspective. Thanks to NTLD Stats, we can see how many domain names have been registered for each New TLD. That’s helpful, from many standpoints. We know which TLDs are selling.
As of June 23, 2017, .XYZ has 5,658,720 domains registered, here are the to 5, based on registrations (NTLD Stats):
.XYZ 5,658,720
.TOP 3,832,606
.LOAN 2,134,647
.WIN 1,020,997
.CLUB 1,012,378
That’s all fine and dandy, but what I haven’t seen yet, until today, is data that shows how many of those domain names have actually been developed into fully-functioning websites? One way to figure that out is to look at how many domain names from a certain TLD are showing up in the Alexa Top 1 Million websites. Alexa publishes a list of the top 1 million websites. If you’ve developed a website, and it has enough traffic (visitors), then it may appear on Alexa’s list of the top 1 million websites. I won’t get into the specifics about how the list is calculated, how to move up on the list, or anything like that. But the data is good enough to use it as a source of reliable data. To give you an idea of which websites are on the list, here’s the top 20:
Number Domain Name
1 google.com
2 youtube.com
3 facebook.com
4 baidu.com
5 wikipedia.org
6 yahoo.com
7 google.co.in
8 reddit.com
9 qq.com
10 taobao.com
11 twitter.com
12 amazon.com
13 google.co.jp
14 tmall.com
15 live.com
16 vk.com
17 sohu.com
18 instagram.com
19 jd.com
20 sina.com.cn
Like I said, let’s not get into how or why the sites are there on the list. What I’m more interested in, at this point, is how many TLDs have sites that are on the list. And, of those TLDs (New gTLDs), how many have more websites on the list than other TLDs?
My Methodology
In order to figure out how many New gTLDs have websites on the Alexa 1 Million websites list, I simply took the list and then did some simple lookups. A simple calculation, for each and every New gTLD, showed me how often a domain name ending in a certain TLD shows up in the list. I took the list from NTLD Stats (a list of 1147 TLDs), which includes .BRAND TLDs (closed TLDs) and gTLDs. A simple formula in Microsoft Excel revealed the numbers.
The Results
So, which New gTLD is winning the website development war? Which New gTLD has more websites listed in the Alexa Top 1 Million websites than any other TLD? Here’s the list of the top 20, along with the number of domain names that appear in the Alexa Top 1 Million Websites:
TLD Count
.xyz 2346
.club 1730
.top 1386
.online 976
.download 971
.blog 950
.site 661
.website 559
.bid 527
.win 504
.space 468
.app 330
.news 321
.link 297
.live 202
To give you a comparison, I also calculated the number of .COM, .NET, and .ORG domain names that appear in the Alexa Top 1 Million Websites, as well:
TLD Count
.com 522110
.net 53187
.org 5246
Of course .COM is going to show a strong number of domain names in the Alexa Top 1 Million Websites–I kind of expected that. But, I have to admit that I am surprised at the number of .XYZ and .LIVE domain names that are showing in the list. I had to adjust some of the initial numbers, as the results were not correct based on subdomain.livejournal.com and .new (.news) as well as subdomain.blogspot.com sites that are on the list.
Want to see the full list of results? I have the data in a spreadsheet here. Keep in mind that the spreadsheet has unfiltered results.
