.nl now has 6 million registered domain names
"An increasing number of traders, especially in the leisure and retail sectors, have been moving online in recent months."
We now have six million registered .nl domain names! A major milestone was passed today when Cindy Woesthuis, owner of Act in Move Training, Coaching & Yoga (Neede, the Netherlands) registered deyogiclub.nl: the six-millionth .nl domain. Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, the number of new registrations has increased, with the result that the historic marker was passed much sooner than previous growth data suggested. The .nl domain is the world's fifth biggest country-code domain, and 64 per cent of all Dutch websites have .nl addresses. Our national domain is also one of the most secure and successful domains on the net.
Since 1986
Our very first domain name was cwi.nl, registered on 1 May 1986 by .nl's founder, Piet Beertema. Piet worked for the Centre Mathematics & Informatics, whose Dutch initials are CWI. The Centre has continued using the domain ever since. With that registration, .nl became the first active country-code domain outside the US. A little less than ten years later, on 31 January 1996, the newly formed SIDN took over as .nl's operator. Back then, only businesses and other organisations could register domain names. That changed in 2003, when registration was opened up to everyone. It was a popular move: the millionth .nl domain name was registered soon after, and in less than a decade the number had soared to five million. Since that marker was passed in 2012, the rate of growth has slowed, with another eight years passing before the counter hit six million. The slowdown was part of a global trend affecting nearly all established domain name extensions. Factors driving the trend included the rise of apps and social media, plus search engines attaching less importance to domain names when ranking hits. In the Netherlands, the depth of the market penetration played a role as well. The country has more than one domain name for every two people: an extremely high density. Every year, about 850,000 new .nl domain names are registered, while roughly 800,000 existing ones are cancelled.
Figure 1. Growth of the .nl domain
Quarter of a million more
"We might be a small nation, but we're big in domain names. There's one .nl domain name for every three Dutch people. You don't see numbers like that anywhere else," says SIDN's CEO Roelof Meijer. "Over the last few months, we've seen a huge increase in the number of registrations. Since the Netherlands went into 'intelligent lockdown', more than 250,000 new .nl domain names have been registered. There's never been a sharper rise." One explanation for the surge is businesses switching their focus to the internet in response to the coronavirus crisis. "An increasing number of traders, especially in the leisure and retail sectors, have been moving online in recent months," continues Meijer. "And, because of their strong local or regional profiles, most of them opted for .nl domain names." Another point highlighted by Meijer is that relatively few pandemic-related scam websites have appeared in the .nl domain. "We maintain an active watch to pick up fake webshops and move against them quickly. There was a minor uptick in detections at the start of the pandemic, but otherwise .nl hasn't seen many malicious registrations trying to exploit the crisis." Amsterdam has the biggest concentration of .nl registrants, but the areas around the university cities of Groningen, Enschede, Nijmegen and Eindhoven are important focal points as well. Interestingly, the average .nl domain name is sixteen characters long, whereas the norm elsewhere is thirteen.
Province | Number | % |
|---|---|---|
North Holland | 1,247,241 | 21.8 |
South Holland | 1,098,677 | 19.3 |
North Brabant | 760,324 | 13.3 |
Gelderland | 746,348 | 13.1 |
Utrecht | 534,722 | 9.4 |
Overijssel | 232,240 | 6.1 |
Limburg | 232,240 | 4.1 |
Friesland | 177,271 | 3.1 |
Groningen | 168,444 | 2.9 |
Flevoland | 154,216 | 2.7 |
Drenthe | 126,492 | 2.2 |
Zeeland | 71,816 | 1.3 |
Unknown | 35,506 | 0.6 |
Total* | 5,700,743 |
Table 1. Number of .nl domain names per province. *More than 200,000 .nl domain names are registered to people and organisations in other countries.
Secure and stable
Meijer is keen to emphasise that .nl couldn't have become so large and successful without the efforts of numerous registrars and other partners. "By adopting a collaborative approach, we've been able to build a robust digital infrastructure capable of delivering high levels of security and stability. That infrastructure has again proven its worth in recent months, taking a huge volume of additional traffic in its stride. Partnerships also underpin our ability to offer users a wide range of high-quality additional services." Against that backdrop, Meijer is confident about the future. "It's hard to say what sort of growth we can expect from the .nl domain in the period ahead," he acknowledges. "However, we normally see a cancellation peak at the end of each quarter, so it's quite possible that the total number of domain names will dip back below six million as June draws to a close. Nevertheless, the trend line is up, suggesting that we'll end the year firmly above six million."
