The Domain Business

Why 10 million can’t be wrong – .uk is a great place to benew

March 2012

Growth of the .uk register has reached a key milestone, with over 10 million domain name registrations. This is a huge achievement and shows how far .uk has come from the first registrations in 1985. In 2000 the .uk register reached its first milestone of 1 million and in 12 short years has multiplied ten-fold.

Technological innovation has driven that growth along with socio-economic change. The internet and the World Wide Web have changed how we do business, communicate and interact with each other. Underpinning this is the domain name system and its impact on the global digital economy.

The top 20 frequently used words in .uknew

March 2012

The .uk registry now has more than 10 million domain names. Each one of those is generally a word, series of words, a number, date, place or brand name, and, of course combinations of all of those.

Growth in the use of cities in .uk domain namesnew

March 2012

The internet plays a huge role in UK commerce and the use of city names within domain names gives a good indication of how the internet is used by local businesses to target local customers. However it also shows how the internet can be used to build local communities, charities and associations.

Domain name lengthnew

The average length of a .uk domain name has grown from 11.67 in 2001 to 13.84 in 2012.

Start with an S…new

The letter S is the most frequent first character used in domain names

Did you know?new

E
is the most frequent character used in domains

Cities in UK domain namesnew

March 2012

In 2001 the 50 cities of England were used in over 22,000 domain names. This averaged 441 uses per city. The least mentioned city was Ripon with 45 and the highest was London with 4,875. Manchester was the second highest with 851. The city of Ely ranks highly with 846 however it is not easy to isolate the term ely from other uses.

Analysis of .uk domain names by Industry categorynew

March 2012

The words that are used in domain names show some interesting trends. As products and services come in and out of vogue, the use of certain words within domain names change reflecting the latest fashions and trends.

Analysis of n-grams in the .uk domain name registernew

March 2012

The analysis of common words used in domain names is an interesting but difficult exercise to complete. A more pragmatic approach is to analyse the use of n-grams. An n-gram is a contiguous sequence of n items. For example the most common 3 character n-gram in the .uk register is ing, which at the start of 2012 appeared in over 1 million of the 10 million .uk domain names.