TLD stands for top level domain. Most of us will be well aware of them – you see them all over the internet. They are the prefixes which follow after the dot in all web addresses, so every time you type a URL into your computer or smartphone, you are in fact using a TLD.
They are generally split into two types, generic and country-specific. Generic TLDs are the ones that most people are familiar with as these are used by some of the biggest brands, businesses and organisations in the world. For example, .com, .org, .net, .edu and .gov are all generic TLDs, or gTLDs. You probably won’t be familiar with country-specific, or country code TLDs unless you are from one of the countries. These include .co.uk (UK), .ae (United Arab Emirates), .au (Australia), .de (Germany) and .ie (Ireland).
New TLDs
In 2014, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) launched a whole new set of gTLDs that would help to diversify the ever growing list of web addresses and give users a wider choice of prefixes, based on what suited the content of their website. This exciting announcement meant that as well as the likes of .com, .co.uk, .net and .org, users would now be able to register sites with TLDs such as .top, .win, .club, .wang, .site and many more.
Now, three years on from the launch, users have snapped up these new gTLDs and there are tens of millions of websites which have to be accessed using new TLDs. But which of these new web address prefixes have users opted for the most?
Most popular new TLDs
According to nTLDStats.com, there are now nearly 30 million websites using the new gTLDs which were launched in 2014. The most popular of these are:
.xyz – This gTLD has nearly 7 million registered domains and a massive 23% share of all new gTLDs.
.top – This gTLD has nearly 5 million registered domains and a 16% share of all new gTLDs.
.loan – This gTLD has 1.5 million registered domains and a 5.3% share of all new gTLDs.
.win – This gTLD has 1.2 million registered domains and a 4.3% share of all new gTLDs.
.wang – This gTLD has just over 1 million registered domains and a 4% share of all new gTLDs.
Other popular new gTLDs include .club, .site, .online, .bid, .vip, .link and .xin.
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