DNS Magnitude rankings are a surprising way to look at top level domain popularity.
Cloudflare announced today that it is publishing new data related to top level domains and their popularity.
The new section in Cloudflare Radar ranks top level domains by their “DNS Magnitude”, which is a measure of how many unique clients send queries to the TLD. (DNS Magnitude was created by Nic.at). Cloudflare says this can be a more accurate picture of a TLD’s reach since a small number of sources can generate a large number of queries used in traditional volume rankings.
Cloudflare bases its measurements on queries to its 1.1.1.1 resolver.
A surprising finding: .su is really popular.
Yes, the legacy country code for the Soviet Union that ICANN threatened to retire earlier this year. (It has since backed away from these plans, at least for now.)
Depending on the timeframe, .su has a higher DNS Magnitude than even .com, which is baffling.
It seems this is all tied to what Cloudflare Radar’s domain rankings show as the most visited domain in the world, 14emeliaterracewestroxburyma02132 .su. So take it with a grain of salt.
[Update: the .su traffic was part of a botnet.]
The top “new” top level domain ranked by DNS Magnitude is Google’s .dev.
One type of domain that performs very well under this metric are dot-brands. .Google, .goog, .apple, and .microsoft are in the top 25.
Cloudflare also has pages for each TLD that show DNS queries, geographical distribution, and certificate data.
.su seems to be entirely driven by 14emeliaterracewestroxburyma02132.su which seems to be composed from an address in MA: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/14-Emelia-Ter-West-Roxbury-MA-02132/59155338_zpid/ – the domain isn’t in the Google cache and seems to return an error 500. NS entries are based on afraid.org.
Yeah, just noticed that. I’m going to add it to the story.
https://overload.su/ is on the list as well. It looks like a legit business so that one does not appear to be a fluke.
The other one looks like it might be running a dns service