Exploring cityTLDs: Adventures of online travel

Among these, cityTLDs are the most popular with some registered twice with different names or spellings (Barcelona: .barcelona / .bcn, Istanbul: .istanbul / .ist, Cologne:  .koeln / .cologne, Moscow:  .moscow / .mockba and Abu Dhabi: .abudhabi / .يبظوبا ).

How attractive are these cityTLDs and should you register your business or brand with one of them? Our data covers nearly two million geoTLDs. For this analysis, we focus exclusively on cities and only on the cityTLDs where we identify at least 500 active sites. We also see that currently the cityTLDs with the highest number of active sites are .tokyo, followed by .berlin, .nyc and .london.

But, just looking at the number of sites doesn’t tell us anything about how these are used. Many could just be domains for sale. We were interested to see which cityTLDs have the highest share of Business and e-commerce websites. At the very top are four Japanese cityTLDs (.kyoto, .okinawa, .nagoya, .yokohama) 32% - 54% of those sites can be classified as Business & e-commerce. In contrast, South African cityTLDs have the lowest share of commercially focused sites (.capetown, .durban, .joburg). 

When it comes to Content sites Moscow (both .moscow and .москва) and five Japanese cities have the highest share, while most German cities (.hamburg, .koeln, .berlin, .cologne) are among the cityTLDs with the lowest share of Content sites.

If a cityTLD doesn’t have a large share of either Content or Business & eCommerce sites, then the vast majority of websites generally fall into any of the following categories: Placeholders, Parking or Low Content, which means a large proportion is up for sale or not interesting to the general public. 

CityTLDs may be of particular appeal to micro, small and medium-sized businesses that want to make a name for themselves in their city and keep their client base local. For a baker in Sydney, cupcakes.sydney may attract more local buyers than a more generic TLD such as .com. As these cityTLDs become more known and grow, it’ll be fascinating to see how their adoption changes over time. Want to explore some websites that use a cityTLD? Here are three interesting picks: 

https://www.football.london/ / / / https://allabout.barcelona/  / / / http://1945.melbourne/