.TK Cements Position As Largest ccTLD Passing 25 Million Registrations

The number of “active” .tk domains has passed the 25 million mark to cement its position as the largest ccTLD, and second largest TLD.

According to the nic.tk website, the number of domains under management is currently more than 25,089,000. The growth has been phenomenal for the island ccTLD that passed the seven millionth DUM in late 2011 and the largest ccTLD in late 2012.

The island nation located north east of New Zealand and Australia in the South Pacific is a New Zealand territory with a population of 1,337 according to the CIA Factbook.

The exponential growth of Dot TK continues because of its free domain name registration process, which has been somewhat controversial due to the amount of phishing activity linked to .tk domains. But the registry has worked hard to improve the problem.

Dot TK, the registry, introduced an anti-abuse API to allow trusted partners to shut down sites that use .tk. Netcraft noted in September 2013 that “this dramatically reduced the average uptime of phishing sites which used .tk domains, making it a less attractive platform for fraudsters. Indeed, .tk does not even appear within the top 50 phishiest TLDs today; however, considering .tk and .ml share the same owner, this makes it somewhat surprising to see .ml being so heavily abused already.”

The largest TLD is .com with 113.7 million DUM followed by .tk, then .de (Germany) with 15.8m. Following is .net (15.1m), .uk (United Kingdom) with “over 10.5 million”, .cn (China – 10.6m), .org (10.4m), .info (5.7m), .nl (Netherlands (5.5m) and .ru (Russia – 4.9m). The largest of the new gTLDs, .xyz, has over 348,000 DUM.

The above statistics were sourced from ccTLD registry websites, RegistrarStats.com, nTLDstats.com and domain-recht.de.