BPN 1160 More than 3 mln .nl domains

Daily more than 1700 .nl domains are registered by SIDN, the Dutch national domain registry. This month the milestone of 3 million .nl domains was passed; it is now the fourth largest country domain in internet.

Presently there are 250 country domains. The Netherlands was one of the first country domain, when the research institute CWI registered the first .nl domain on May 1, 1986. Ever since registrations have continued to such an extent, that there is one registration for every five inhabitants. In terms of penetration, The Netherlands are the first of the pack. However in terms of numbers The Netherlands rank fourth behind Germany with 12 million .de domains, behind China with almost 12 ml .cn domains and behind the UK with almost 7 million .co.uk. Last year the .nl domains in The Netherlands grew with 23 per cent.

The large number of .nl domains is linked to the use of internet and especially broadband. In 2007 more than 82 per cent of the Dutch households had access to internet. Globally this is third place behind Korea and Denmark and it is 25 per cent above the OECD average. The Netherlands is second in broadband connections with 35 per cent behind Denmark with 36 per cent. Of the Dutch companies 97 per cent uses internet. Of the Dutch consumers 81 per cent is weekly online, even up to 12 hours. Nine out of ten Dutch internet users can not live without internet.

Facts & figures- .nl-domain names are the longest with an average of 16 characters, while other TLDs are 13 characters long.
- The most .nl domain holders live in Amsterdam. But university cities like Groningen, Enschede, Nijmegen and Eindhoven yield many .nl domains.
- 66% of the holders use the .nl domain for a personal e-mail address.
- The most expensive .nl domain is the domain for soccer voetbal.nl which was sold for 1 million guilders (500.000 euro).
- The prices for the auctioned .nl domain names rose with 50 per cent from 1000 euro to 1500 euro.
- The market shares in The Netherlands: .nl 70 per cent, .com 14 per cent en .eu 9 per cent
- The share of consumer .nl-holders was 29 per cent op 1 January 2007 en 33 per cent op 1 January 2008.

Source: SIDN, July 2008

Blog Posting Number: 1160

Tags: domain