.COM and the gTLD marketplace

Source: http://www.domaintools.com/internet-statistics/
See as a bar chart

If you exclude the 267 domains whose oversight is some other country, you're left with sixteen possible "generic" choices of a TLD in which to register a domain.

The domains are marked as restricted or unrestricted. Registricted domain registers must meet certain conditions to receive such a domain; unrestricted is okay for anyone.


  • .aero - air transportion; restricted
  • .arpa - reserved by the Internet Architecture Board; restricted
  • .asia - Asia-Pacific region; restricted
  • .biz - business and commerical use
  • .cat - Catalan language and culture; restricted
  • .com - commerical, personal, or any use;
  • .coop - cooperatives; restricted to Co-Op organizations
  • .edu - post-secondary educational institutions; United States only; restricted
  • .gov - United States government orgs at the federal, state, and local levels; restricted
  • .info - informational use
  • .int - international organizations established by treaty; restricted
  • .jobs - employment-related; restricted
  • .mil - US military; restricted
  • .mobi - mobile device based; restricted
  • .museum - museums; restricted
  • .name - individuals;
  • .net - originally for network infrastructures; today unrestricted
  • .org - originally for organizations; today unrestricted
  • .pro - professions; restricted
  • .tel - services between telecom and the Internet; restricted
  • .travel - travel agencies, airlines, hotels, tourism bureaus; restricted

The only six open tlds to register a name in are com/net/org/biz/info/name.

As of July 2009:

  • All 3 letter possibilities are gone on .com
  • All4 letter words are depleted on .com
  • The most popular registered domain name length is 11 characters
  • There are 255,000+ domain names that are 32 characters or longer
  • All of the top 10,000 family names are registered as a domain name
  • The most common letter to start a domain with is S
  • More than 270,000 domains contain the sequence SEX

.COM market dominance, 1998-2009

cnobi9801.png cnoib0205.png cnobi0609.png

Click on a graph to get to the original (flash) version that you can right-click, full screen, and print.

Sources: InterNIC, IANA, Hobbs Internet Timeline, ZookNIC.