Last year saw the introduction of many new Top Level Domains (TLD’s). A special class are the city TLD’s, like ‘.amsterdam’, ‘.rio’ or ‘.tokyo’. It makes sense for cities, companies and non-profits to use these domains, for instance travel.taipei is short and to the point. So the registrations go well, NYC is on top with close to 85.000 registered domains. But is it for many buyers just another referrer, bought to prevent others from using it, or are they actively marketed and used? And, important from out point of view, do these sites run on green energy? Read about this and more below.
There are currently 211 domains in this category within the Alexa top million. The distribution and popularity is very uneven, take a look at the following toplist:
| ranking | city TLD | # sites in top |
| 1 | Tokyo | 76 |
| 2 | Taipei | 20 |
| 3 | NYC | 19 |
| 4 | London | 18 |
| 5 | Moscow | 18 |
| 6 | Berlin | 11 |
| 7 | Paris | 10 |
| 8 | Amsterdam | 6 |
| 9 | Nagoya | 5 |
| 10 | Hamburg | 5 |
| 11 | Yokohama | 4 |
| 12 | Melbourne | 3 |
| 13 | Vegas | 3 |
| 14 | Wien | 3 |
| 15 | Koeln | 3 |
| 16 | Brussels | 2 |
| 17 | Joburg | 1 |
| 18 | Rio | 1 |
| 19 | Osaka | 1 |
| 20 | Sydney | 1 |
| 21 | Capetown | 1 |
So although NYC has around 2,5 times more registrations, the .tokyo brand is clearly much more actively used in practice.
If we look at the number of city TLD sites in use per continent, Asia is a clear winner:
| position | continent | number | percentage |
| 1 | Asia | 106 | 50,2% |
| 2 | Europe | 76 | 36,0% |
| 3 | USA | 22 | 10,4% |
| 4 | Australia | 4 | 1,9% |
| 5 | Africa | 2 | 0,9% |
| 6 | South America | 1 | 0,5% |
When we greencheck these domains (click here for free API access) to find out if they are green hosted, we get a different picture: only seven out of the 21 city TLD’s have sites that run on green energy. If we factor in how many times a site is visited, we get the following weighed ranking:
| position | City TLD | percentage green |
| 1 | Koeln | 75% |
| 2 | Wien | 74% |
| 3 | London | 72% |
| 4 | Amsterdam | 59% |
| 5 | Berlin | 45% |
| 6 | Hamburg | 33% |
| 7 | NYC | 4% |
So for every time a .koeln-site is visited, in 3 out of 4 times the page was served by a green hoster. The .wien TLD is doing equally well, with .london on a respectable third place.
When we distribute this outcome again against continent, green hosting in this domain is clearly a European affair, with only .NYC having a tiny percentage of green hosted sites. But where is Asia in this list, no green hosting at all?
So where Asia is clearly outperforming Europe and the USA in the actual use of city TLD sites, when it comes to green hosting, Europe is – for now at least – doing quite well.
Note: do you know of any green hosters in Asia? Please drop us a line!
The Green Web Foundation, Sweden.
Disclaimer: the Alexa top million changes rapidly all the time. This dataset was compiled early September 2015, and does not necessarily reflect the current status and ranking of these sites.
