The Second One: .NET Domain Extension

.NET, the little brother of .COM, introduced in the same year as .com, .org and .edu, in 1985. We will cover the details about .net, which is the second most registered domain extension with 13.7 million domain names. 

The Story of .NET

The first created .net domain name is nordu.net. It was created on 1 January 1985 according to the public records, and NORDUnet (organization) has used this domain name since 1985. 

.NET was introduced in 1985, managed by Network Solutions from 1991 to 2001. VeriSign acquired Network Solutions in 2001 and became the registry of .net extension. VeriSign has been managing .net for 20 years. 

The extension was intended for network-related companies but it’s being used for general purposes. 

As of March 2020, with 13.7 million registered domain names, .net is the second most popular generic top-level-domain, following .com.

The Oldest .NET Domain Names

These are the oldest still-existing .net domains that we detected by using dofo.com. You may also want to see our research about 100 Oldest Domain Names & Their Current Status.

Two of the oldest 10 domain names are still being used: 

• Nordu.net: The website of NORDUnet (NORDIC Gateway for Research and Education). 
• Oar.net: The website of OARnet (The Ohio Academic Resources Network). 

Sesqui.net was sold for $2,000 on 1 September 2013. Sura.net was sold in 2005 for $185, and later it was sold again for $3,255 on 15 August 2015.

Also nsf.net and sesqui.net are listed for sale now.

Most Popular .NET Websites

(Most popular websites data was taken from Alexa.)

The first three of the most popular 10 websites are in Chinese: csdn.net, ettoday.net, and pixnet.net.

.com versions of some of the sites listed above are redirected to .net versions such as; behance.com, researchgate.com, and slideshare.com.

The list of .com versions of the most popular websites that sold before:

If we look to see how .net took part on at the most popular 100, 1000 and 100,000 websites:

• 2% of the most popular 100 websites are .net.
• 3.9% of the most popular 1,000 websites are .net.
• 4.5% of the most popular 100,000 websites are .net.

Most Expensive .NET Domain Sales Ever

(Note: This list is not complete because not all the domain sales are reported. Domain sales data was taken from Namebio.)

Top Countries of .NET Domain Extension

The United States has the most .net domain registration. 35% of all .net domains, 4.8 million, are registered in the US. China and Japan are following the US with 570 and 520 thousand domain names.

USA and China are in the first and second place, as in the .com extension. 

Please note that Panama took the 6th place on this list because a few of the popular whois privacy services use addresses in Panama.

Most Popular Keywords of .NET Domains

The most popular 10 words included in .net domains are group, online, bet, vip, home, tech, life, web, solutions, and services. More than 40 thousand .net domain names registered for each of the keywords above. 

The keywords group, online, home, tech, life, solutions, services are common with the top 10 popular keywords of .com domain.

Some other considerable keywords in the top 100 list are health, media, design, world, auto, shop, center, service, art, global.

We excluded the stopwords such as the, end, of, my, for, in, by, to, on, etc.

.NET Domain Count By Years

(*2020: As of 14 April 2020.)

Every day thousands of domain names are being deleted because of not being renewed. So, the above numbers are not the total .net registration count for each year. These are the number of registered and still-existing .net domain names for each year.

.NET Domain Count By Length

i.net and q.net are the only two single-character .net domain names. They were registered before IANA’s restriction of single-character domain names registration in December 1993.

Top .NET Registrars

With 4 million registered .net domain names, almost 27% of all .net domains, Godaddy is the domain registrar that has by far the most .net registration. Tucows, Network Solutions, Alibaba, and Namecheap are following Godaddy, with 710 thousand, 620 thousand, 580 thousand, and 480 thousand currently registered domains, respectively.

How Many of .NET Domain Names are Being Actively Used?

Not all 13.7 million .net domains have websites. 6.5 millions of .net domain names have active websites (with at least one page) and the remaining 7.2 million domain names are not being used.

• ACTIVE WEBSITE: 6.5 million
• NO WEBSITE: 5.4 million
• PARKED: 1.8 million

“No website” means the domain name is not resolving at all.

.NET Domain Names for Sale on Marketplaces

There are more than 30 million domain names for sale listed on several marketplaces and 2.5% of these domain names are .net. That means 700 thousand .net domain names are listed for sale by their owners on the marketplaces such as Sedo, Afternic and DAN.

Internationalized .NET Domain Names

Internationalized Domain Names (IDN), which was first introduced in 2000, allows anybody to register domain names with non-Latin alphabets characters.

There are 190 thousand .net internationalized domain names; this is 6.2% of all IDNs and 1.4% of .net domain names. 

The first .net IDN is Korean 일화.net that was registered on 10 November 2000 and it means “anecdote.”

.NET Domain Name Disputes

The popularity of .net domain names shows itself on domain name dispute cases. A domain dispute occurs when somebody claims the right to use a domain name.

According to DNDisputes.com which presents all domain dispute cases filled in WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization), 9.5% of all domain dispute cases are .net domain names.

Where You Can Register a .NET Domain Name?

You can register a .net domain name on all domain registrars. Here is the list of some popular domain registrars:

1. Godaddy
2. Namecheap
3. Network Solutions
4. IONOS (1&1)
5. Enom
6. Alibaba Cloud
7. Xinnet
8. Google
9. Gandi.net
10. Register.it
11. Namesilo
12. Name.com
13. Domain.com
14. 123Reg
15. Dynadot
16. Epik

.NET domain extension, the second most popular gTLD, has kept its place in the ranking for years. As an alternative to .com, it’s generally preferred by the people who can’t get the .com. 

Will .net keep being the second most popular extension or lose its place to other alternatives? Please share your comments.