In Germany, you can choose from a large range of domain endings. The uncontested favourite, however, is the German country code ending .de.

60-Percent Market Share in Germany

From the very early hours of the Internet, the people in Germany were greatly interested in having their own presence on the web. Private individuals, organisations, domestic companies and international groups, who want to succeed in the German market, preferably choose the country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) .de. A 60-percent market share with 15.5 million domestic .de domains renders impressive proof of the familiarity and relevance of the national domain extension in the German market. If you add the domain holders residing outside of Germany, this number exceeds 17 million.

The excellent reputation of .de domains is also based on its consistent above-average share of positive use scenarios. A representative sample of 50,000 domains analysed by the umbrella association of European ccTLDs, CENTR, in September 2021 by means of monthly crawling showed 50 percent of .de domains to lead to fully functioning websites with content. The overall average value for generic TLDs was 22 percent.

Domain Spectrum in Germany

Parties interested in a domain can choose from a wide range of offers in Germany. Besides the country code .de for Germany and the European ending .eu, which has a 4-percent market share in Germany, there are multiple so-called generic TLDs available. Endings such as .org, .net and first of all .com that are not allocated to a geographic region, account for an accumulated market share of 36 percent in Germany.

Since 2013, they are supplemented by the new generic TLDs, which represent brand names, geographic regions or a special purpose. At the end of September, they had a joint share of some 2 percent in the German domain market. This corresponded to a total of 698,000 domains, which were distributed across 565 new TLDs. Nearly half of these were accounted for by the top 12 new generic domain endings (.online, .shop, .berlin, .nrw, .xyz, .store, .club, .bayern, .hamburg, .app, .koeln and .gmbh).

Other Geographic Endings in Germany

The new generic TLDs also include a number of German geoTLDs – .bayern, .berlin, .cologne, .hamburg, .koeln, .nrw, .ruhr and .saarland. In September, the number of domains registered under these TLDs added up to just some 122,000. Thus, the overall inventory of all German geoTLDs is only about a third of .de's net growth over the current year, which amounted to more than 350,000 domains so far.

The Position of .de Compared at a Global Level

Also beyond the German borders, .de with its more than 17 million registered domains is in the top league and belongs to the top 3 TLDs worldwide. The undisputed global number one is .com with a current inventory of 158.6 million domains. .net has 13.5 million and .org 10.5 million domains under management. Compared to its neighbouring country codes, .de also has a clear margin. At the end of September, .uk recorded 11 million registered domains, .fr 3.8 million, .ch 2.4 million and .at 1.4 million. Only the Chinese country code TLD .cn outperforms .de with around 23 million registered domains, according to the most recent figures.

(Sources: DENIC, CENTRstats, nTLDstats and VeriSign)

For more facts and figures on .de go to our statistics section.