Last year, a map of the world scaled the most popular top-level domains. The Pacific island of Tokelau reigned supreme.
In 2017, its superiority has yet to fade.
The number of .tk websites may have dropped from 31 million to 18 million, but the four square miles of land in New Zealand still has more domain registrations than almost any other nation or territory in the world.
The strange-looking world map, produced by UK domain registry Nominet, shows just how total its dominance is. Tokelau is barely visible on standard world maps, but here it becomes a huge area in the southern Pacific. Russia and America, by comparison, shrink to relative obscurity.
China, the world's most populous nation, is now first on the list with more than 20 million registered domains on .cn, followed by Germany (16 million on .de), United Kingdom (10.6 million for .uk and .co.uk) and Tokelau (18 million for .tk).
The nation with the smallest number of domain registrations? Guinea Bissau (.gw), with just two. The tiny size of the United States on this new map is due to the relative obscurity of the .us top-level domain, which has just 2,323,053 registrations.
While .com is by far the most popular top-level domain (123 million registrations), it isn't attached to an individual nation. When introduced in 1985, .com was intended for use by commercial organisations but has since been opened up for general use.
The popularity of the .tk registration can be traced back to 2000 when Dutch entrepreneur Joost Zuurbier founded Freedom Registry (now FreeDom), the registry for .tk domain names.
Zuurbier was looking for a top-level domain that was open to his idea of completely free registration. After much searching, he stumbled upon Tokelau.
Unlike most domains, registering a .tk address doesn't cost anything. Registrations that remain unused for a certain period of time are replaced with ad pages, with paid .tk domains letting people take legal ownership.
FreeDom makes money through adverts placed on lapsed .tk registrations, with a cut of this passed onto the people of Tokelau. In 2012, this cut accounted for one-sixth of its tiny $1.2m annual GDP.
More recently .ml (Mali), .cf (Central African Republic), .ga (Gabon) and .gq (Equatorial Guinea) have all opened themselves up to free registrations. "Our visualisation of global internet use paints an interesting picture of the domain world," said Nominet CEO Russell Haworth, adding that the high internet adoption rates in Europe give it a much larger geographical size.
As the map shows, Africa is relatively underrepresented. This is partly due to poor connectivity in some areas and a preference for using mobiles. Also, many in Africa favour .com as a domain name ending over their own country code.
Updated 05.05.17: This article has been updated to reflect the changes made to the 2017 domain name map
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
