.ORG Domain Extension: Make The World Better Together

.ORG, one of the oldest domain extensions, was introduced in January 1985 and now has more than 10 million domain names. We will cover the details about .ORG, the third most registered generic extension. 

The Story of .ORG

.ORG was one of the original domain extensions introduced in 1985 together with .com, .net, .edu, etc. Its name “org” is derived from “organization,” and it was intended for non-profit organizations. Today there’s no restriction on using a .org domain for for-profit purposes and many people already do that. 

The first .org domain name mitre.org was registered by The MITRE Corporation on 10 July 1985. 

Public Interest Registry, a not-for-profit organization established by Internet Society, took over the operation of .ORG from Verisign in 2003. .ORG had 2.4 million registered domain names at that time. Verisign gave up .ORG in exchange for the right to maintain the operation of .COM. 

In November 2019, .ORG’s registry organization Public Interest Registry was sold to the private equity firm Ethos Capital for $1.1 billion. .ORG community, some public institutions, and people who would be affected by the agreement raised concerns about the deal. 

ICANN, the organization responsible for coordinating the procedures of DNS, delayed the deal two times, last time after the letter of California’s attorney general.

After the deal, the registry website has been changed from pir.org to thenew.org. 

.ORG reached 10 million domain names in June 2012. 

As of March 2020, it’s the third most registered generic domain extension with more than 10.4 million domain names. 

More than 70 countries use .org as a second level domain extension such as .org.uk (United Kingdom), .org.cn (China), .org.au (Australia) and .org.tr (Turkey).

The Oldest .ORG Domain Names

The list above contains the oldest still-registered .org domain names that we detected using dofo.com’s database. 

The first 9 domain names in the list are also listed in 100 Oldest Domain Names & Their Current Status. 

8 of the oldest 10 .org domain names are still being used: 

• mitre.org: The MITRE Corporation
• src.org: Semiconductor Research Corporation
• mcnc.org: A corporate website
• rand.org: The RAND Corporation
• mn.org: Redirected to SkyPoint Communications, Inc. website, SkyPoint.com.
• rti.org: RTI International
• usenix.org: The USENIX Association
• software.org: A research organization

Most Popular .ORG Websites

If we look at the lists to see how many .org domain names took part on at the most popular 100, 1000 and 100,000 websites:

• 1 of the most popular 100 websites is .org. (Wikipedia.org)
• 2.2% of the most popular 1,000 websites are .org.
• 3.3% of the most popular 100,000 websites are .org.

.ORG has not much of the global internet traffic compared to .com. 

(Most popular websites data was taken from Alexa.)

Most Expensive .ORG Domain Sales

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

5 of the 10 most expensive .org domain names are being used actively. Others are parked or not resolving. 

Ready.org is also one of the most expensive sales of March 2020. See the full list here. 

There are 256,443 domain name sales over $1,000, and 10,333 of these sales, which is 4%, are .org.

Top Countries of .ORG Domain Extension 

The United States ranks first in the list, having the most .org registrations with 5.9 million domain names. Canada and Germany are following the US with 930 and 500 thousand domain names respectively. 

Panama is in fourth place on the list because some of the Whois privacy services use addresses in Panama. 

Most Popular Keywords of .ORG Domains

The most popular 10 keywords for .org domain names are foundation, life, health, center, church, group, online, school, club, and project. More than 45 thousand .org domain names registered for each keyword in the list. 

It isn’t surprising that the word foundation is the first keyword in the list. Other words related to “organization” such as center, church, school and project are also in the list, unlike .com and .net. 

The keywords life, group, and online are common with the top 10 popular keywords of .com. 

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

.ORG Domain Count By Years

*2020: As of 20 April 2020

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

.ORG Domain Count by Length

There are 17 single-letter .org domain names registered before IANA’s restriction of single-letter and single-digit domain names registration in December 1993. 8 of them redirect to the website of the owner institution. 

All single-letter .orgs and their situations:

• A.org: Astana Inc. 
• B.org: Redirects to benevolent.net
• C.org: Redirects to change.org
• E.org: E – British owned energy supplier
• F.org: FinTech Labs
• G.org: Owned by Gis Corporation and shows a thanks page.
• I.org: Owned by Facebook and shows an error page. 
• M.org: Owned by GoDaddy’s domain portfolio NameFind and for sale
• Q.org: A cryptocurrency
• R.org: Redirects to robinhood.org
• T.org: Redirects to teachforamerica.org
• U.org: Redirects to understood.org
• V.org: V Foundation
• W.org: Redirects to wordpress.org
• X.org: X.Org Foundation
• Y.org: Redirects to ymca.net
• Z.org: Redirects to zerocancer.org
• The letters D, H, J, K, L, N, O, P, and S are reserved by the registry.

One digit .org domain names are for sale on Sedo for $1 million except 7.org (The David Beckham Unicef Fund) and 8.org (Donate 8). 

Top .ORG Registrars

With 3.7 million .org domain names, almost 36% of all .org domain names, GoDaddy tops the registrar list. Network Solutions, Tucows, Namecheap, and IONOS are following it with 630, 590, 420 and 380 thousand domain names, respectively.  

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

We know that not all registered domain names have a website on them. 5.7 millions of .org domains have active websites (with at least one page) and the remaining 4.7 million domains are not being used. 

• ACTIVE WEBSITE: 5.7 million
• NO WEBSITE: 3.2 million
• PARKED: 1.5 million

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

.ORG Domain Names for Sale on Marketplaces

More than 30 million domain names are listed for sale on several marketplaces and 1.6% of these domain names are ending with .org. There are more than 500 thousand .org domains listed on the marketplaces such as Sedo, Afternic and GoDaddy Auctions. 

Internationalized .ORG 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 25 thousand internationalized .org domains; less than 1% of all IDNs and 0.25% of .ORG domain names. 

The oldest .org IDN is 智能小区.org which was registered on 10 November 2000 and it means “smart community.”

.ORG Domain Name Disputes 

A domain dispute occurs when somebody claims the right to use a domain name and it happens for .org domain names too. 

According to DNDisputes.com which presents all domain dispute cases filled in WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization), 6% of all domain dispute cases are .org domain names.

Where You Can Register a .ORG Domain Name?

You can register your .org  domain name with many 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

.ORG domain extension, the third most popular generic TLD (gTLD), keeps its domain count steady. It has more than 10 million domain names and most of them used actively. 

We’ll see in the next few years if changing hands will have an impact on .ORG’s growth. 

What do you think about the future of .ORG? Share your comments below.