Nominet Celebrates .UK’s 25th Birthday As Second Largest ccTLD
Nominet, the national registry for .UK domain names celebrates 25 years since the first .UK domain names were registered on Saturday 24 July 2010 by becoming the second largest country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) and fourth largest Top Level Domain (TLD). Since its inception in 1985, the .UK registry has witnessed the huge growth in the internet.
Among ccTLDs, .UK is the second largest ccTLD with 8,587,726 registrations as of 30 July. This follows .DE (Germany) with 13,762,500 registrations while the number of .CN (China) domain names registered has slipped dramatically to 8,250,000 (as of 30 April, the latest statistics publicly available) from a peak of 13,680,700 in November 2009 due to changes in registration requirements and the end of promotions with cheaper registration fees.
Among other ccTLDs, the .NL ccTLD is the fourth most popular with 3,975,200 registrations (30 July) and then .EU is fifth with 3,239,400 (30 July).
Key milestones include:
- 1985: First registrations of .UK
- 1996: Nominet set up to manage the .UK domain name space, 26,000 registrations on the register
- February 2000: 1 million registrations
- May 2006: 5 million registrations
- Today: There are now more than 8.5 million .UK domain registrations.
After 25 years, .UK remains a relevant and trusted environment that presents the most appropriate, local information for web users. Research from Nominet shows that 77 per cent of British consumers preferred to use a .UK rather than a .com when searching for information online and that at a small business level, 9 out of 10 companies choose a .UK as the domain for marketing their business.
Lesley Cowley, CEO, Nominet, says, “We are delighted to celebrate 25 years of .UK. In that time, the internet has changed the lives of billions of people around the World. As businesses, we rely on it for buying and selling goods, as governments for interacting with citizens, and as individuals for organising and managing many aspects of our lives, whether that be online banking, shopping or entertainment.
To register your .UK domain name, check out Europe Registry here.
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