For a number of years, Germany (.de) was the world’s most popular ccTLD in terms of registrations.
But about two years ago China made its ccTLD a lot more affordable and easier to get. Since then, the country has been registering roughly 20,000 country codes a day. The country went from 2 million registrations to 10 million registrations in an amazing 12 months.
Within the past two months, China overtook Germany for the top spot, with approximately 11.4 million registrations. It’s safe to say that Germany isn’t going to take that lead back.
Below is the list of the leading countries overall:

The country that stands the best chance of one day giving China a run for its money is India. But I’m not holding my breath. India stands at only 1.2 million registrations currently and is growing at 46% annually. It’s an impressive growth rate — a rate that is bound to increase, but China is also adding registrations at a good clip.
Why isn’t .us higher on the list? Blame .com. Most Americans assume .com is synonymous with USA. Over time, I expect this to change, but that’s a topic for a future post…
July 18th, 2008 at 11:47 am
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July 24th, 2008 at 1:51 am
[…] Search has the top TLD by numbers details: For a number of years, Germany (.de) was the world’s most popular ccTLD in terms of […]
July 26th, 2008 at 6:59 am
[…] que .cn, le code de la Chine pour les noms de domaine, est le plus populaire devant .de pour l’Allemagne. L’Argentine (.ar) et le Brésil (.br) figurent devant la […]
July 26th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
[…] que .cn, le code de la Chine pour les noms de domaine, est le plus populaire devant .de pour l’Allemagne. L’Argentine (.ar) et le Brésil (.br) figurent devant la France […]
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August 29th, 2008 at 6:54 pm
That’s a great post, thank you. Congratulations to China. To be precise .CN now is 12,264,615 and .DE 12,224,797 but Chinese domain names are growing faster so soon the gap will increase!
September 22nd, 2008 at 6:25 pm
[…] since I am now a great deal more heavily involved in international SEO and SEM. So for years the most popular ccTLD was .de (Germany) now, this may not come to many as a surprise, China or .cn is the most popular! […]