This amazing map shows the world by number of web domains

Alan Martin March 10, 2016

Rule Britannia! Britannia rules the (online) waves! That’s right, if country size were determined by the number of domains registered using each nation’s suffixes, .uk is doing very well, as this wonderful map from Nominet demonstrates.

This amazing map shows the world by number of web domains

The first thing to notice, perhaps, is that America is not a superpower any more: europe_and_the_us_map_by_domain_numbers

But that’s actually extremely misleading, because individuals and companies in the US favour the classic .com domain, which with 123 million registrations is significantly larger than any individual nation. A website suffix without borders.

The .uk suffix is the fourth most popular domain overall, with 10,660,818 registrations, making it second in Europe, some way behind Germany’s .de with 16,056,043.

Still, on a global stage, Europe is doing all right – just look at how it compares to Asia:

China snatches second place with 16,810,737 registrations, but hang on a second… what’s that to the right of Japan?

With 31,311,498 domains registered, .tk is nearly the size of Germany and China combined. So where is this internet superpower on a regular map?

It’s here:

That’s the island nation of Tokelau, with a population of just 1,400 people. Do some quick maths in your head, and you’ll find that either each man, woman and child on the island has 22,365 internet domains each, or something strange is going on here.

It’s the latter: 16 years ago, Dutchman Joost Zuurbier created the Freedom Registry, now known as FreeDom, which allows people to register a .tk domain free of charge. All revenue comes from advertising, and

back in 2012 CNN estimated that a sixth of the nation’s GDP came from .tk domains.

So how does the map look with Tokelau included?