Posts tagged "tld-trends"

3 posts found.

April 30, 2026 24 min read

The Dead Web: 1.65 Billion Hostnames That No Longer Resolve

We compared the master DomainsProject corpus (3.12 billion unique hostnames ever observed) against the 17 April 2026 active crawl (1.47 billion currently resolving) and found that 52.9% of the observable web no longer answers the DNS. .com alone holds 808 million dead hostnames; the five Freenom-managed ccTLDs (.tk, .ml, .ga, .cf, .gq) are 99% extinct; the new-gTLD program churns at 75% dead; and a small spine of restrictive ccTLDs — .jp, .it, .de, .nl — sits below 30%.

March 25, 2026 13 min read

The Rise of .xyz: From $25,000 Gamble to 45 Million Domains and the New gTLD's Only Success Story

We parsed 45 million entries in the .xyz namespace from our dataset and found 11 million direct registrations generating 34 million subdomains — a 3:1 ratio that reveals a TLD being used as live infrastructure, not parked inventory. .xyz is the largest new gTLD on Earth and the 4th largest gTLD overall, larger than China's .cn, the UK's .uk, and Brazil's .br. It is the only new gTLD that broke into the top 5, and the data shows why: a combination of $1 promotional pricing, crypto/Web3 adoption, developer infrastructure, and one very famous corporate endorsement.