These are the world's most popular web domains

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The number of registered web domains has hit a new high as the scramble for internet domination continues, research has found.

According to Verisign, there were 354.7 million domain names registered across all top-level domains (TLDs) online today by the end of the first six months of 2019. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, .com led the way in terms of the number of TLDs registered, with a total of 142.5m. China's .cn domain came in second, ahead of the publically-available .tk Tokelau domain, which rounded out the top three. Germany, the UK, Taiwan, the Netherlands and Russia also made it into the top ten.

Online

.net domains came fifth overall with 13.6 million registrations, with .org coming in seventh with 10.0m domains registered.

Verisign noted that there had been an 0.8 percent overall increase in TLD registrations compared to the first quarter of 2019 and a 4.4 percent increase year-over-year.

Overall, 23.0 million total new gTLDs (ngTLDs) domain name registrations were completed by the end of Q2 2019, an increase of 0.1 million domain name registrations, or 0.4 percent, compared to the first quarter of 2019.

Of these, new .com and .net domain name registrations totaled approximately 10.3 million in the period, compared to 9.6 million domain name registrations at the end of the second quarter of 2018. 

There were 6.5 million new-format TLDs registered during the period, with .top, .xyz and .site the most popular.

Mike Moore
Deputy Editor, TechRadar Pro

Mike Moore is Deputy Editor at TechRadar Pro. He has worked as a B2B and B2C tech journalist for nearly a decade, including at one of the UK's leading national newspapers and fellow Future title ITProPortal, and when he's not keeping track of all the latest enterprise and workplace trends, can most likely be found watching, following or taking part in some kind of sport.