Majestic Sees 22% increase in Domains in 80 days

Majestic has just increased the number of known domains in its index by 22% over the last 80 days.

When we posted last week that we now support all new gTLDs, we got a Tweet from the new Head of development for Moz, Russ Jones:

As Rand was so kind as to mention us in his Whiteboard Friday, I thought I would do a little digging into the gTLds to try to answer Russ’s question. I am sure Russ has his own data, but it may or may not be unsurfaceable. (Big Data is a beast if you need to extract it in a different way to the way it was stored.) We checked the difference in our data between: the 15th August and the 4th November 2015 (about 80 days) to see what has changed.

Some Hard Numbers

Majestic’s database has found 22% more domains last week compared to the start of the test. This may be because our discovery is working better, because even the .com domains rose by 23% and the .de domains rose by 33%, but the stellar increases come from the increases in new gTLDs. In percentage terms these increases are naturally huge, as they start from zero or near zero numbers, but even in absolute terms you can see some significant changes, as users try to grab new domains.

Some of the real stellar movers seem to be domains which do not even work well using UTF8 to visualize… TLds like “xn--55qx5d“, which I hope someone can translate for me? They went from 407 domains in our index 80 days ago to 12,712. A 3,023.3% increase!

.koeln domains are also popular (Koeln is German for “Cologne”), with 9480 new domains discovered.

For our American audience, you can also be content that your domain buying skills remain right up there… we found 7 new TLDs that were NOT IN OUR INDEX 80 days ago with more than 10,000 domains today:

tld		As of 4 nov 2015
.realtor		61035
.top		30495
.party		28322
.website		20799
.science		19249
.one		10767

Some of the new gTLDs were already being noted in our index, so it will really take up to 90 days to get a really good view of the take-up of the new domains, but it is clear that showing Russ overall pie charts will already be pointless, because .com domains remain by far the gold standard, with many tens of million of domains compared new gTLds in the 10K range instead of the 10 Million range, you can see that pie charts don’t give up much of the story… .com will swamp the chart.

So what about the new domains on the block? Who’s “Winning”?

The new gTLD uber owners (a new kind of Mafia) are all in the game for different reasons. Some are there to protect their brand, others are simply out to sell more domains or start the long road to SEO heaven or hell. But if I limit the list to TLDs that have increased by 100% over the last 80 days (which pretty much excludes the old TLDs) and also only count domains where I see > 1,000 domains with that TLD (which will most likely exclude all the Brand ones for now),  then here is your pie chart Russ:

The largest slice of pie is .xyz domains. These have been recorded for more longer than some of the newer gTLDs, but for people’s reference, we saw 352,952 of these domains in this data set.

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