While some countries use and value their country code more fully, there are also regional differences in how generic extensions are treated. For example, I suspect that the .net extension is more popular in certain regions. There are definitely regional variations in use of some new extensions.
Each month Donuts publish a Domain Name Trend report. Among the information presented, are the popular extensions in each region. For purposes of the report, Donuts divide the world into four regions.
- North America
- South America
- Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA)
- Asia Pacific Countries (APAC)
In the just released May 2021 Domain Trend Report, while some extensions such as .live are popular in all regions, other TLDs are strong only in certain regions.
The .live extension placed first in every region except South America, where it placed second.
The .life TLD also is popular everywhere, second in North America, third in South America and Asia Pacific, and fourth in EMEA.
The .world extension is fairly popular everywhere, although least strong in South America where it places sixth.
One extension with big regional differences is .digital, that places first in South America, third in EMEA, and not even on the top lists for the other regions.
The .company extension appears for first time on the North America list, in a relatively strong fifth place. It is in fourth place in South America, but nowhere on the top lists in EMEA and APAC.
You can see the complete list in the following table courtesy of Donuts. Keep in mind that these are rankings, without specific numerical data, so some of the differences may be small between TLDs ranked near to each other.
Why is this information of importance to domain name investors? Some terms are more suited to certain regions, and it is important to know the acceptance of the extension as well in that region.
Also, I suspect the different domain name marketplaces have different regional footprints, so there may be implications for where you choose to list the domain names for sale.
The report also lists the top 20 premium sales of the month. A few names that caught my attention are carbon.trading, bitcoin.band, cannabis.clinic, and Q.services.
Q.services is already in use, redirecting to QLOC, a game industry service provider. It seems that the company is upgrading from q-loc.com.
I presume that carbon.trading will be used for some sort of climate offset trading platform, but the site was not operational the day I checked.
Here is a link to the full May 2021 Trend Report, while you can check out the reports for other months at this link.
