InternetX Global Domain Report - Top 10 TLDs Used In Canada (1 Viewing)

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The deep dive into the domain industry.
 
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Did not realise that the adoption of .ca's was so low... .com to .ca > 3 : 1
 
Considering the data sources, I don't see any source that could have given them .COM data for Canada. VeriSign doesn't have the information and I guess they didn't want to work with whois scrapers...
 
I'm actually surprised that .CA penetration is as high as 19%; my guess would have been lower. Not my wish, but my guess. I have a hunch that our friends at CIRA have more accurate data about penetration of .CA ownership in Canada. When I think of all the Canadian people and businesses I interact with online, and their domain names, I would say that the majority use .COM. Not saying they should, but that's what I have noticed. As a country, we are not that loyal to our ccTLD, although we are more loyal than lots of other countries. I believe our close proximity to the USA and the USA's fondness for .COM has hugely influenced Canadian's choices of TLD. It's a fascinating topic, and I wish Canada was more loyal to our ccTLD.
 
I would love to see a list of the top 100 retailers in Canada and to see what domains they use.

Walmart
BestBuy
HomeDepot
Rona
Canadian tire
Amazon
Google.ca
Mercedes

The list goes on and on, they are all .ca

Sure the uneducated (about domains) use the .com but almost all retailers of significance use the .ca
 
For what it's worth - appx. 60% of our WHC registration base are .CA, and about 30% are .COM. The majority of our customers is based in Canada.
 
This is BS as virtually all the major businesses in Canada use .CA as their primary web address, but also own .COM and other TLDs. It's probably just a pure numbers game where they scraped WHOIS for company names and used that without any further nuance. Or more likely, just scraped for "Canada" without taking into consideration the massive .COM investor market.

For example, if Amazon Canada uses Amazon.ca for their primary address, but the company owns 3,000 other .COM domains, is that 1 for CA and 0 for .COM (as it should be) or 1 for CA and 3,000 for COM?

For actual functioning real-world businesses I'd rate it to be closer to 50:50 if you stick to primary "face of the company" domains, with those at the top of the food chain having a higher ratio of owning and using their core .CA brand and the low-end guys with those horrible 26-letter .COMs having a worse ratio.
 
I just read this again, and it seems to have absolutely nothing to do with business use or any use whatsoever, and it's just raw registration numbers.

So if a Canadian domain investor (or a large Canadian subsidiary using .CA like Amazon or Google) has a portfolio of 5K .COM domains, then that's 5K for COM and 0 (or 1) for .CA. Simple as that. It's just GEO ownership of TLDs, which is a fait accompli, as .COM is the worldwide leader in raw numbers as well, so why would Canada be any different.

No news here, .COM outsells all other TLDs worldwide, don't need to read all about it.
 
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a lot of OG Canadian .com domain investors could skew that data, although some of them moved offshore long ago.
 
I think the source of the error is likely an interplay of domain privacy and the fact that one of the largest registrar's on the globe, Tucows, is Canadian based. I saw in Dofo blog a couple of years ago some stats that seemed to show Canadians were dominating a bunch of extensions that I knew, or felt pretty sure, was not true. When I drilled down, it was registrant country data on whois being used. That in many cases now reflects the privacy service. For example, if you have xyz registered at Dynadot, with privacy on, it shows registrant region as California, USA, even though you properly have the real registrant data set to Canada. Under privacy, it is essentially impossible to get a true picture on data like this.
-Bob
 
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By the way, if we scaled the 3.3 million .ca by the figures in this report showing the dominance of .com among Canadians, it would need Canadians to have registered over 10.9 million .com names. That is a lot in a country that represents 0.48% of the world population. Yes, some very active domain investors in Canada, and many business take both .com and .ca, or some only .com, but I don't believe that 8.4% of all .coms are registered by Canadians.
-Bob
 

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