Every country registers nTLDs according to its own taste – whether that’s .PARIS in France, .TIENDA in Spain, or .CLUB in Canada. Many nations take part in global trends; so their TLD habits might be similar. Yet some countries are very inward looking, showing peculiar affection for TLDs the rest of the planet ignores. Alright, then. Which nations are weirdest?
We can answer that question using this definition of country-TLD bias or “Skew”:
$latex Skew:\ = \frac{TLD\:\%\:of\:Country}{TLD\:\%\:of\:Other\:Countries}$
For example, the Skew for .QUEBEC / Canada is 883, indicating that a person in Canada is 883 times as likely to register .QUEBEC (if registering an nTLD domain) than a person outside Canada. Meanwhile, the Skew inside Canada for .PRESS or .TECH or .CLICK or .LOL is approximately equal to 1. That means Canada behaves exactly like the rest of the world where these other suffixes are concerned.
In order to decide how peculiar Canada is overall, we’ll be looking at the Skew values for each country’s top 100 nTLDs:
Country | Skew > 2 | Skew > 4 | Skew > 8 | Skew > 16 | Skew > 50 |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Germany | 82 | 68 | 37 | 20 | 16 |
Cayman Islands | 31 | 22 | 17 | 15 | 6 |
France | 58 | 34 | 18 | 13 | 9 |
Austria | 73 | 54 | 21 | 13 | 3 |
Spain | 69 | 40 | 21 | 12 | 7 |
Greece | 78 | 52 | 23 | 11 | 1 |
Italy | 66 | 33 | 19 | 10 | 3 |
Australia | 80 | 61 | 22 | 9 | 5 |
China | 38 | 24 | 12 | 9 | 5 |
Brazil | 47 | 23 | 10 | 9 | 4 |
Ireland | 75 | 50 | 15 | 9 | 3 |
Switzerland | 80 | 59 | 27 | 9 | 2 |
Russia | 23 | 10 | 10 | 8 | 8 |
Mexico | 81 | 49 | 17 | 8 | 4 |
USA | 66 | 43 | 15 | 8 | 1 |
Chile | 37 | 17 | 11 | 8 | 1 |
UK | 79 | 62 | 18 | 7 | 4 |
Japan | 28 | 19 | 12 | 7 | 3 |
Norway | 79 | 60 | 23 | 6 | 3 |
South Africa | 69 | 45 | 12 | 6 | 3 |
Gibraltar | 24 | 15 | 9 | 6 | 2 |
Hong Kong | 63 | 26 | 14 | 6 | 1 |
Belgium | 65 | 36 | 14 | 5 | 3 |
Denmark | 78 | 62 | 33 | 5 | 2 |
Romania | 26 | 10 | 6 | 5 | 1 |
India | 34 | 9 | 5 | 5 | 1 |
Israel | 79 | 47 | 9 | 4 | 2 |
Singapore | 79 | 47 | 9 | 4 | 2 |
Netherlands | 72 | 38 | 13 | 4 | 2 |
Canada | 86 | 52 | 9 | 4 | 1 |
Lithuania | 27 | 15 | 9 | 4 | 0 |
Thailand | 47 | 13 | 5 | 4 | 0 |
UAE | 70 | 38 | 10 | 3 | 2 |
Poland | 47 | 22 | 9 | 3 | 1 |
Turkey | 28 | 11 | 6 | 2 | 2 |
South Korea | 26 | 11 | 2 | 2 | 2 |
Malaysia | 74 | 35 | 7 | 2 | 1 |
Sweden | 69 | 34 | 8 | 2 | 1 |
Indonesia | 10 | 6 | 4 | 2 | 1 |
New Zealand | 4 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 1 |
Hungary | 49 | 21 | 9 | 2 | 0 |
Czech Republic | 63 | 31 | 6 | 1 | 1 |
Whois Proxy | 11 | 5 | 2 | 1 | 1 |
Cambodia | 6 | 4 | 2 | 1 | 1 |
Cocos Islands | 5 | 4 | 2 | 1 | 1 |
Ukraine | 12 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
Panama | 36 | 8 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Pakistan | 10 | 3 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
Vietnam | 7 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Armenia | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
So who wins? Which countries turned their back on the rest of the world in order to register their own local nTLD favorites? That depends.
If we focus on extreme cases of Skew > 16, then Germany is the most idiosyncratic country, followed by the Cayman Islands, France, Austria, Spain, Greece, and Italy. Why? Partly because of local GEOs. Germany has several: .BERLIN, .HAMBURG, .BAYERN, etc. So do France and Austria. Yet the same applies to Japan, Belgium, and South Africa – none of which shows the same extremes in Skew. Another factor is keyword language. German nTLDs like .JETZT, .SCHULE, and .GMBH tend to pry German-speaking nations loose from the global norm. As for the Caymans, well, that’s another story altogether.
If we focus on all cases of Skew > 2, then the effect of local GEOs is mitigated. And we begin to see nations whose weirdness is manifest in other ways. Now Canada appears to be the most bizarre nation of all. Germany is still #2; but the next results are equally surprising: Mexico, Australia, Switzerland, Norway, Israel?
Turn this ranking on its head, and we can see which nations behave “normally”. These either set global trends or follow them. Domains with whois proxy ought to be a fairly random sampling of nationalities, yet this group ranks #8 out of 50 for having the least Skew. Oddly enough, not the USA or China that most closely mirrors the global norm. Rather, it’s forgotten nations like Armenia, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Pakistan. Lack of access to local GEOs or to nTLDs in the local language is part of the story. Yet there’s more. Perhaps domainers in the developing world are surrounded by so many foreign influences (and economic opportunities) that they emulate planet earth in its entirety.
Raw domain registration totals were obtained from nTLDStats.
drew says
“In order to decide how peculiar Canada is overall…” as a Maritimer (east coast Canada), I can think of a few different ways to answer that!
To what extent do you think the preferred registrar for a particular country may play a role in skew outliers like Canada? For instance, does CLUB have a strong marketing deal with a registrar that over-performs (compared to its global performance) in Canada?
Joseph Peterson says
@drew,
Good thinking. My hunch is that registrar promotions do play a role … though it’s hard to say which registrars in which countries with which TLDs.
Certainly, a registrar with a big footprint in country X could promote a sale of TLD Y (which has a small global footprint). And, to the extent that such a sale triggers registrations, country X and TLD Y would appear to be linked. Yet there might be no intrinsic link other than 1 registrar promo.
Actually my database code is written to slice and dice by registrar in exactly the same way as it slices and dices by country. So I could grab some interesting registrar / nTLD stats. Just haven’t done the slicing & dicing yet.
Mike says
I am surprised whenever I see a statistic that there are actually people who use new GTLDs. From everything I see, hardly anyone uses them at all, so it always surprises me that the domain industry focuses on them so much.
Joseph Peterson says
We don’t get around in self-driving cars either. Yet the automobile industry, tech hobbyists, and general consumers hear a lot about self-driving cars.
I think it’s natural to be curious about whatever is new, diverse, or likely to change.
Also, nTLD usage is often quite niche. Unless we live in Montreal, Berlin, London, Melbourne, or NYC, should we expect to see .MONTREAL, .BERLIN, .LONDON, .MELBOURNE, or .NYC websites? Unless we’re hiring a plumber or a photographer, would we notice .PLUMBING or .PHOTOGRAPHY?
Usage remains sparse. But it’s the same with .IO. Most people have never seen a .IO site.