Success of regional and city domains often goes unnoticed

Haves and have-nots

A lot of the applications are likely to be for so-called 'geoTLDs': top-level domains for cities and regions. For some years now, many places have had to put up with their neighbours and rivals parading exclusive internet extensions, and haven't had an opportunity to get their own. Amsterdam, for example, has a dedicated internet domain, but Rotterdam doesn't. Tirol has one too, but not Tuscany.

Success of the new domains

As the new application window approaches, many of the cities and regions without geoTLDs are busy preparing proposals. In that context, it's pertinent to ask how the geoTLDs authorised last time around have fared. After all, anyone looking at the domain name landscape might initially think that the 2012 geoTLDs haven't done particularly well: not a single one features amongst the 10 biggest new extensions (nTLDs). The largest of the geoTLDs, .tokyo, is number 33 in the nTLD ranking, with 200,601 registered domain names.

Table 1: Number of registrations among the top 10 new gTLDs as of May 17, 2024. Source: ntldstats.com.

However, that's a skewed way to judge success, because the number of registered domain names doesn't say anything about usage. What's more, many of the extensions listed above don't charge people to register domain names. So a large number of registered names doesn't necessarily imply commercial success.

Looking beyond absolute numbers

In the last few months, 2 studies have been published, which seek to gauge the success of new internet extensions in other ways. First, there was DotZon's annual survey of Digitale Stadtmarken (Digital City Brands). In their report, which came out late last year, the German research team identified .amsterdam as the most successful city domain. That's a striking finding, given that .tokyo and .london are much bigger in absolute terms.

What DotZon did to reach their conclusion was look at how highly Google ranked domain names with the various city extensions, and where they were in the lists of the most commonly visited domains. The usage levels of registered domain names under each extension were also taken into account. From those indicators, an overall score was calculated, then divided by the population of each city. And, at the end of the exercise, .amsterdam came out on top.

Brand value

More recently, US market expert John Matson presented his view of developments in the domain name market. He ranked city domains on the basis of traffic and reached the conclusion that even those with relatively small numbers of registered domains were capable of generating considerable brand value for their cities. Matson's analysis put Las Vegas's city TLD far ahead of the rest. However, .vegas is something of an outlier, because most websites using the extension are gambling sites with no link to the city. Setting .vegas aside, Matson's top 5 are:

Table 2: Ranking of the top 5 city domains based on traffic. Source: John Matson Consulting.

Small numbers, big success

Delving a little deeper into the stats, it becomes apparent that a small number of websites linked to governments, events or big businesses can give a TLD a very high profile. In other words, even a modest volume of registrations can make a city TLD extremely successful. That's an interesting takeaway for all those cities and regions making plans for 2026.

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