Dynadot

analysis The Most Used Domain Extensions – From Under the Cisco Umbrella

Spaceship Spaceship
It is important to know how much actual internet traffic there is on a domain extension, or top level domain (TLD), since this is one indicator of the health of the extension. There are various measures of internet website use, with the main ones being Alexa, Cisco Umbrella, Majestic, SimilarWeb, and QuantCast. In this post I take a look at the global popularity of different web extensions as measured by the Cisco Umbrella ranking methodology.

Each website use rating system operates on a different principle. For example, Alexa mainly measures visits to sites by those who have installed the Alexa browser plug-in, while Majestic measures backlinks to sites from different subnets.

The methodology for all four rating systems is covered in this paper. That research paper also introduces TRANCO, a new ranking system that uses results from the other four in order to obtain a ranking that is more resistant to deliberate manipulation.

Cisco Umbrella Rankings
Recently CENTR began using the Cisco Umbrella rankings in their data on domain extensions. The Cisco rankings are based on the number of unique DNS (Domain Name System) queries are made for a domain, but only counting those from different IP Internet Protocol ) addresses.

Since the Cisco Umbrella network handles over 100 billion requests every day, the rankings are based on a large dataset. You can read more about the Cisco Umbrella rankings in their post introducing the system.

The top million sites are updated daily in the Cisco Umbrella ranking. I used the Cisco Umbrella rankings for this post partly because they conveniently provide rankings by extension. The data is freely available, and has been provided since 2016.

It is important to realize that the Cisco Umbrella ranking system indicates which extension, or domain, is more popular than another, but does not provide publicly-released measures of the significance of those differences.

The Top 50 Most Used TLDs
I looked at the Cisco Umbrella rankings for domain extensions. The ranking list provided by Cisco is actually a mix of extensions (TLDs) along with some commonly referenced individual sites, such as many specific Amazon server addresses. I extracted only the TLDs, in compiling the following ordered list. Therefore the numbers will be different from those on the raw Cisco list, but the order is the same.

Here are the relative web traffic rankings for different domain extensions, with higher on the list meaning more traffic.
  1. .com
  2. .net
  3. .org
  4. .io
  5. .co
  6. .tv
  7. .ms
  8. .us
  9. .me
  10. .uk
  11. .co.uk
  12. .fi
  13. .ru
  14. .news
  15. .de
  16. .gov
  17. .st
  18. .cn
  19. .jp
  20. .info
  21. .edu
  22. .ly
  23. .fr
  24. .cloud
  25. .it
  26. .ai
  27. .to
  28. .mobi
  29. .xyz
  30. .link
  31. .pl
  32. .eu
  33. .ca
  34. .nl
  35. .network
  36. .be
  37. .biz
  38. .in
  39. .market
  40. .co.jp
  41. .ua
  42. .im
  43. .vn
  44. .gg
  45. .mx
  46. .pro
  47. .club
  48. .es
  49. .am
  50. .media

Findings and Surprises
Many of the results could have been predicted, but there were also some surprises.
  • As expected, .com is in first place.
  • Most will not be surprised that .net and .org, in that order, take second and third places.
  • Beyond that, predictions are more challenging. The general purpose country code extensions .io, .co and .tv, in that order, are the next TLDs with the most traffic, at least as Cisco Umbrella measure web traffic.
  • The next place was a real surprise to me, with .ms taking 7th place. The .ms domain extension , a country code for the British Overseas Territory Montserrat also finds many other uses. It is used by Microsoft for certain projects, and also sometimes for sites related to the state of Mississippi, in addition to several other international uses.
  • The .us country code did surprisingly well, coming in 8th place, well above some country codes that typically sell for higher prices.
  • It was followed by the well known country extensions .uk, .co.uk, .fi and .ru in that order. Given the size of the country .fi is surprisingly active, but the extension finds use in the financial world as well as its regional meaning.
  • I would not have predicted .news as the highest-ranking new global top level domain name (new gTLD) in 14th place, nor that it would edge out major country codes like .de, .cn and .jp.
  • At 16th place is the U.S. government extension .gov, higher than the education .edu and .info extensions that took 20th and 21st places respectively.
  • The .ly extension finds use in domain hacks, and takes 22nd place, while France .fr is in 23rd place.
  • Another new gTLD comes next, with .cloud in the 24th position.
  • After Italy’s .it, the .ai extension takes 26th place. It has found use of late for artificial intelligence startups, or investors hoping to sell to them,
  • The country code for the island nation of Tongo, .to, now sold from Toronto and promoted both as a domain hack or phrase, and for use by the Toronto community, secured 27th place.
  • The decline of .mobi is apparently over-stated, as the extension, while not selling for the high valuations of the past, is still in the top 30 in terms of use.
  • Two more new gTLDs crack the top 30 with .xyz and .link in positions 29 and 30. The .xyz extension also does well in Alexa ratings.
  • A number of major country codes, including .eu at 32nd, take the next number of places, follow by the new gTLD .market in 35th place. There were numerous high value .market domain sales in the past, but it is not as active in aftermarket sales of late. Clearly from this ranking it is still is actively used.
  • The .biz legacy alternate extension was in 37th place.
  • The country code extension for India, .in, is in 38th place.
  • The .gg country code, now used for global gaming, picked up 44th place. This was closely followed by Mexico’s .mx in 45th place.
  • The legacy alternative extension .pro took 46th place.
  • Two other new gTLDs, .club and .media took 47th and 50th places respectively. The Alexa rankings also show .club as a relatively heavily used extension.

Reflections
While ranking may hide big differences in actual use, I was surprised that a number of new gTLDs ranked as highly as they did. Eight new gTLDs placed in the top 50, beating out many major country code extensions.

The ranking of .news is particularly impressive, outpacing .gov, .info and .edu, as well as such major country extensions as .de, .cn, .jp and .fr.

The general use country codes .io, .co, .tv and .me all placed in the top ten, supporting these as popular choices for businesses and domain investors looking outside the legacy big three.

Keep In Mind
All ranking systems are dynamic and change from day to day. I have been researching this article for a few weeks, and during that time the rankings were pretty stable. Also remember that any ranking system may mask huge differences between activity of different TLDs even when their rankings are only slightly different. On the other hand, different rankings may actually correspond to rather similar use rates, especially as one goes further down the list.

It is important to stress that these are rankings based on perceived global traffic. No doubt each country code extension finds extensive use within its own region, even though when measured globally many are well down the ranking list.

Have Your Say
I would love to hear your reflections.
  • What things most surprised you in the rankings?
  • How important is web traffic when you consider investing in an extension?
  • Which extensions do you predict are on the way up, and which are on the way down, in terms of web use?
  • In a year’s time what extensions that did not make this list of top 50, would you expect to now be on the list?
 
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The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
An important factor that I realize I don't know is how redirects are handled. I presume someone going to a redirected domain still counts as a count for what you initially went to, but I am not sure. It might make a big difference on some.
Most redirects will be HTTP redirects unless they are going to load balancers. Most of the .uk subdomain websites redirect to the .co.uk primary and they use HTTP redirects. There's also a possibility of analytics URLs being included in the data.

Regards...jmcc
 
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For news, probably few made it into the 1 million and their average (or mean) shows much higher.
I think we are agreeing, but you may not agree that we are :xf.wink:. Yes, only 419 .news in Alexa 1M, but was just pointing out as independent evidence that while not many active .news sites the ones that are developed seem in general to have steady traffic.
ridiculous to assume that .news sites even for media are above .com
I don't think anyone is saying they are?

As mentioned in a reply posted after your post, depending on how redirects are counted, a few major redirects may be contributing to the traffic as well, even though the .news is not developed. Like I was surprised that CBC.news redirects to our major national news network in Canada, and Apple.news to information on the Apple News service.

I often use the site: Google command and with some extensions they are either garbage or dark places. But with .news, at least from here, was surprised how many legitimate regional news services seemed to come up.

I am not about to rush out to double my 0 .news holdings, but I think there is probably legitimate enough traffic that it is indeed somewhere in top 50, traffic wise, doing better than most new gTLDs, but anywhere after 3rd place on that list is at least an order of magnitude down in real use.

Bob
 
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If you do a Google search for:

Site:.News

You will see many websites that are actually using .News in addition to Apple and Amazon who might be redirecting their .News domain.
 
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For news, probably few made it into the 1 million and their average (or mean) shows much higher. It is ridiculous to assume that .news sites even for media are above .com. All top media outlets use either .com or .org or their respective cctld.

Where did you see any mention of .news sites being above .com
 
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I think we are agreeing, but you may not agree that we are :xf.wink:. Yes, only 419 .news in Alexa 1M, but was just pointing out as independent evidence that while not many active .news sites there do not seem to be a huge number of inactive ones, to the same degree and that may explain the use statistics to some degree.
I don't think anyone is saying they are?

As mentioned in a reply posted after your post, depending on how redirects are counting, a few major redirects may be contributing to it as well, even though the .news is not developed. Like I was surprised that CBC.news redirects to our major national news network in Canada, and Apple.news to information on the Apple News service.

I often use the site: Google command and with some extensions they are either garbage or dark places. But with ..news, at least from here, was surprised how many legitimate regional news services seemed to come up.

I am not about to rush out to double my 0 .news holdings, but I think there is probably legitimate enough traffic that it is indeed somewhere in top 50, but anywhere after 3rd place on that list is at least an order of magnitude down in real use.

Bob

Bob, I appreciate your analytics and my posts are not directed at you. Rather at whoever supplies this misleading tables and stats. Bad analysis, imo, is worse than no analysis at all.

For example, what is "to some degree"? 1% or 99%? Huge difference, yet, all is boiled down to "to some degree".

Redirects help landing domain, not the other way around. 419 .news (provided the same ratios are true further than 1MM) or 0.04% of all sites there cannot result in top position like that, no matter how you look at it.

Hence the conclusion that the whole data is garbage when used for extrapolating how much traffic each extension gets.

And, yes, .de limited to 1% of population beats most extensions, because most countries (except USA and some others) have the following usage pattern (estimate): 50% local cctld, 30% .com, 20% all others.

While those 30% globally add up to domination of .com, those 50% in developed markets like Germany can beat the global ones that get only fraction of that 20%. In fact, over 1000 extensions are competing for 20%, while half of that 20% also is taken by .org, .net, .co, .tv, .io
 
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Where did you see any mention of .news sites being above .com

in the chart, .news sites are shown as higher traffic than .coms
 
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in the chart, .news sites are shown as higher traffic than .coms

If I am not mistaken the chart is saying:

amount of traffic / number of sites

is a bigger number for .News than .com
 
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If I am not mistaken the chart is saying:

amount of traffic / number of sites

is a bigger number for .News than .com

Right...

Basically, if you had some obscure extension, let's call it .extension, and you'd make with it into top 1000, your extension would be recognized as the one with the most traffic.
 
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As requested, here are the next 50 (i.e. places 51 to 100). Hopefully I did not miss any, as the further down the list the more non domain entries are there. For example the site github.io (which now redirects to a .com after the acquisition of the popular code sharing site) by itself would have made the top 100 list as would Google's brand domain .google.

You will see a number that people have asked about on this list, such as .au and com.au andd also .nz. Also some of the Radix that seem somewhat popular by other measures, like .online, make this extended list. Not surprising to see big countries like Brazil on the list. App is on the list but .dev is well below it, surprisingly low. Also the well respected .ch is here. The repurposed .fm (and .am near end of other list) are both on it.
  • .video
  • .au
  • com.mx
  • .asia
  • .online
  • .cc
  • .app
  • .fm
  • com.au
  • .al
  • .ch
  • com.ua
  • .br
  • .id
  • com.br
  • .se
  • .sg
  • .gl
  • com.cn
  • com.vn
  • .pw
  • .tech
  • .tr
  • .kr
  • .jobs
  • .la
  • .nz
  • com.tr
  • co.kr
  • .live
  • .at
  • site
  • co.nz
  • .tw
  • .email
  • .hk
  • .top
  • .ac
  • .ie
  • .ws
  • com.tw
  • .dk
  • .pt
  • .services
  • .no
  • co.za
  • .lt
  • .is
  • org.cn
  • com.hk
So who are not even on this extended list? I was surprised that .global which seems to have a lot of corporate use is well off it. As mentioned .dev is well down. I was surprised that .solutions is not on this list, but it is not far below. I might have thought .solutions would rank above .services, although the difference in even twenty ranking places at this point of the list is probably very little difference in actual use.

Not surprisingly the once much registered, but never much used, FFM .loan TLD is way off the list, something like 1200 place (I did not calculate exactly but it's gross is past 1300).

One extension that has sold for high prices a few times, but well down the list is .bio at 400+ on list.

The geo oriented new extensions seem very far down. Surprised, but I guess their global traffic is hurt by mainly regional interest, as the smaller population country codes, particularly those with languages not widely used in other areas. Even if you got 5% of the traffic in a region with a population of 10 million, that is going to be totally negligible on a global traffic basis.

my expectation for future is, .one will get more and more exposure...it is such beautiful and elegant, I expect it can win some position
@Zilla I personally like the extension too, although don't have many. Like it's elegance and flexibility as a word, and the resales values are decent, and love the reasonable renewal cost. But, at least as the CISCO Umbrella algorithm measures it, it still has a way to go. It's gross position is 225 which would be after the non TLD extractions something like 160 maybe (I did not calculate precisely as it is a manual process). I do expect it will be higher in a year, but not sure if it will make the top 50 or 100.

generic single words were available in .work, went a bit overboard
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, @bidigitals, but right now let's just say .work has lots of work to do, but room for improvement as a positive! :xf.wink: - it has a gross position of 272 the day I extracted the TLD list, which is probably something like 200 after the non TLD extractions are done.

Bob
 
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I hate to be the bearer of bad news, @bidigitals, but right now let's just say .work has lots of work to do, but room for improvement as a positive! :xf.wink: - it has a gross position of 272 the day I extracted the TLD list, which is probably something like 200 after the non TLD extractions are done.

Bob


Thanks to @Bob Hawkes for going through all the trouble to compile all these stats, but it's important to keep in mind that these stats although interesting, but should not be used as the Only metric in selecting what New gTLDs or other TLDs are worth registering for domainers. For one thing even in the most obscure and least popular extensions there are still a handful of domains that might make perfect sense to register. Also there are some extensions that might be popular with end users who register their actual company or personal names and don't care about the most popular keywords that domsiners think are valuable.

You have to consider many different metrics when registering a domain and most importantly is your own gut feeling when considering what to register as far as having the most potentials.

For example I like the .ForSale gTLD but it's not even on the list.

Here are some examples of my domains:

EVs.ForSale
3dPrinter.ForSale
SmartGlasses.ForSale
SmartHomes.ForSale
FlyingCars.ForSale
Wearables.ForSale
 
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I just wanted to say I agree 100% with what you said @oldtimer.(y)

In new extensions it is quality match across dot and possible end use that matter most.

There are huge occasional sales in extensions with little traffic or even registrations.

I think that, as difficult as it is to estimate, traffic is relevant, but only a small part of total picture.

Cisco Unbrella is one, of several ways, to estimate use. I think it is worth our communities time to be familiar with each of the options and their limitations.

Bob
 
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Nice data. Some unexpected rankings. Keep in mind that they measure DNS queries. This is not equal to web traffic but can relate to any kind of service running on a domain.

They also incude subdomains therefore a 'big' popular and established website would generate more queries per ip (they run way more services on that domain) and eventually will make the TLD rank higher. Theoratically you could rank at no 1 with just one domain registered and developed in that tld.
 
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I just wanted to say I agree 100% with what you said @oldtimer.(y)

In new extensions it is quality match across dot and possible end use that matter most.

There are huge occasional sales in extensions with little traffic or even registrations.

I think that, as difficult as it is to estimate, traffic is relevant, but only a small part of total picture.

Cisco Unbrella is one, of several ways, to estimate use. I think it is worth our communities time to be familiar with each of the options and their limitations.

Bob

It's also worth mentioning that different people register domains for different reasons, so there is not one formula that can work for everyone, I for example collect domains as a hobby and use them to express my ideas and opinions and I don't necessarily like to sell domains as I like to create a network of quality domains that I can use to forward to my main website for the book that I am thinking of publishing online (and perhaps off line), meanwhile I have made sales landers for most of my domains in the hopes that I can make couple of sales so that I can pay for renewals and new registrations, but in general I like to be able to keep all my domains.
 
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Very surprised and happy that .uk is above .co.uk. Especially since I own Future.uk :)
 
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'The .us country code did surprisingly well, coming in 8th place, well above some country codes that typically sell for higher prices' end of quote

Nice ! But still .US not get the attention (in term of sale ) as should be in a market with 300 million people
But past 2 year's grow in domain names sale & hope .US will be more promoted by @Sedo , SquadHelp @GrantP ( is time to accept other extensions if they are proud that SH is in top 500 ), Afternic , Godaddy , Epik & other marketplaces to promote .US
 
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Number of DNS queries from different IP's does not mean number of different human visitors.
There is no reliable traffic ranking system as it's technically impossible.
 
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@Bob Hawkes thank you for this interesting article, I have really learned from reading your articles, post and questions!
I too learn a lot from Bob. However, Bob tends to feed my addiction to domains. For example, i just registered the domain SwingTime.co after reading the "Top 50 Most Used TLD's" I was just waiting for something like this to confirm my suspicion that .Co is more likely than not the go to TLD when .com isn't available. After having done a little research, i discovered Swingtime.com is vaulued at GD for $11,000 and DomainMarket.com is asking an outrageous $194,888 for Swingtime.com. Regardless of whether I have a use for the name (which i do), it's an unbelievable buy for 11.99:xf.rolleyes:

Thanks Bob....Stop it:xf.grin:
 
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I have been mainly offline today so sorry a bit late responding to comments (someone told me taking a break was a good idea :xf.wink:).

@Zilla your point that if traffic is dominated by big sites, which are on domains outside the range of the average domainer, is a good point. Although, I think people seeing real use being made of the extension would have some carry over effect in saleability of $$$ to $$$$ domains in the extension.


I actually had wondered whether the 6 "news" sites that sold last year for $16,000 + each, and are operated by the same controversial USA person, might be accounting for it but it seems not so. These are not in any way based on Alexa but if you look at Alexa 1M stats for .news they do not rank nearly as high, but they are top 10 with 419 in Alexa 1M, or 1 for every 140 names registered, one of the higher ratios and actually higher than .com as a ratio. I also did a Google .site search and there seem a fair number of real news sites from around the world operating on the extension. So no, I don't think it is just one or two with huge traffic.

Re your .cloud comment, remember these are web use stats which is something completely different than value in domain aftermarket and domainer interest. I think use is not irrelevant, but it is only one factor.

Yes, I will do so in a separate post.

I admit I did not see many either, but I think it is the case that the ones that are out there are all getting a reasonable amount of traffic. When I first began researching the Cisco numbers a few weeks ago I was so surprised about .news and especially .ms that I held off until I looked at a few different listings to make sure that they persisted.

I wonder also if by the nature of .news sites, lots of references from social media, get lots of people looking repeatedly and casually at them so the numbers add up. Although I would have thought .info and .edu would have been higher for the same reason.

I also speculate, could be totally wrong, that perhaps the .cloud and .io strongish numbers are due to the nature of the types of resources at those sites - like lots of people getting bits of code from an .io site or cloud based data from a .cloud. I have no idea whether this reasoning makes sense.


At first I was surprised but I think we need to take into consideration that .de has a population of about 83 million in a world population of about 7.7 billion, or about 1%. No matter how active it is in its region, it is hard for regional domains to complete in global traffic with ones that have some traffic from all over the world.

I suspect that there is some bias against Chinese traffic, maybe a lot, in the data, and oppositely probably a pro-US bias (even though Cisco is very global) and that might explain why .us did better than I would have thought, and .cn not as well.

I was surprised that .ca that is so dominant here was not higher, but then when I thought about that it is almost entirely Canadian and our population it makes sense that in global traffic does not do so well, and I think same for au and nz (I think they were not far off - will give more data shortly). Re .cc, not sure. It certainly seems to sell better than many others.

Well they were side by side which could mean virtual tie, and probably does. I don't know the details of the co.uk to matching .uk transition, and others who know .uk have already provided comments.

@Michael Ehrhardt the stats you are giving are registration numbers. This is data on traffic, at least as estimated by domain name calls from different IP addresses, and does not directly relate to registration numbers. There is no doubt that .de is a very valuable and highly used in Germany extension. But as I mentioned above, with 1% of world population not surprising it will not be at top in global use stats.

It is a good question and I don't know for sure, but I would think as long as the calls came from different IP they would be counted, so it would open up ways to try to manipulate via dynamic changes, probably. But I don't know, just speculating.

HaHa :xf.grin: Well you could try to modify the stats that way, and I am sure someone does, but with so many global calls better get a big number of those discretely hosted sites!

Really .io does have a big following in the tech/code world. I was a little surprised to see it after the legacy three, but remember that the ranking may be a tiny difference, and I suspect that it is. I suspect .com is like 8x more than .org and .net and they are about tied, and then another fair jump before the next few that are close together. I am not saying this directly from data, but I suspect that is the case. I was not surprised to see .co high, in fact expected it a bit higher than .io. For both the issue as a domainer is really the renewal costs that are like $25 ish.

I will get through responding to the other comments, but think I will post this one now.

Thanks for the great questions and critical thinking everyone.

Bob
Great article Bob, nice job! We thought the most surprising extension was number 10 .uk Dot best nowhere to be found, maybe another year?
 
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@Blitzpotz .cn is weak because in order to own we need upload our ID to the Chinese. There is no investment future since web should be free and distributed: not a medium for government to collect our IDs.
 
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actually to see the true trend in domains usage you have to take traffic data for domains registered in last 2 years only. in the past not all extensions where available, gTLDs have been available for much longer time tha nTLDs, so it is not accurate to count traffic from old websites to get a conclusion about what domains are on demand now.
 
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Dot.ms - I cannot nearly believe that Microsoft and Mississippi are creating that much traffic.

FYI, I have owned a .MS name for more than 10-years and can confirm this parked domain gets regular type-in traffic on average about 200-300 plus a month (stats from this year) by residents or people looking for Mississippi info (possibly also re Microsoft) month after month. Steady traffic, going back more than a decade.

P.S. Thanks Bob for all the hard work and vast amounts of time in doing the very interesting report!
 
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The biggest surprises for me were .ms (I wasn't even aware of this one) and .news. I would have thought ..media sites would get more traffic than .news.
No surprises with .me (some major sites on this extension), .co, .tv, or.io. Surprised by .ly. Pleasantly surprised by .us. Completely surprised by .mobi as I dropped a few premium .mobi domains a few years ago, after zero offers. I believe 2 extensions will rise: .ai (so many sites up and going up and excellent after market sales to endusers) and .gg (with gaming growing -- twitch, video games, legal sportsbetting in the USA. esports, fantasy gaming) -- .ai could rise in the top 20, and .gg could rise in the top 30 by the end of 2020,
 
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What a wonderful post again! Thank You @Bob Hawkes

Agreed with .io and .co coming after top 3 but their renewals are a bit high for Long Term HOLD.

I have a feeling that .app extension would climb up the ranking in future.
 
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