The official geographic top-level domain (TLD) for the continent of Africa has recently crossed the 15,000 active domain registration milestone. .africa domains are becoming popular.
The .africa domain extension has gained wide acceptance across Africa and rest of the world with most of the registrations understandably being from South Africa. The top 10 African countries with the most .africa domain registrations have been mostly Anglophones: South Africa, Morocco, Nigeria, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Mauritius, Ghana, and Namibia.
It was opened to the public for registration under the General Availability stage on 3rd July 2017. The fastest rate of registration, however, occurred between 26th July and 9th August 2017.
As of 27th April 2018, there are 15,069 registered .africa domain names with an average daily add of 18 domains in the 7 days preceding the date.
.africa has been registered by users across over 120 countries globally by 43 domain registrars. Some 7% of the domains make use of Domain WHOIS Privacy services thus obscuring the country of registration.
The top 3 .africa Accredited Domain Name Registrars based in Africa are Diamatrix, Web4Africa, and Genious.
Some 8 .africa domains are in the Alexa Top 1 million website ranking which could imply that majority of the registered .africa domains are parked or forwarded to domains with other extensions, or not enough of them have pulled enough web traffic to break into the top 1 million websites on Alexa’s list.
As of 27th April 2018, the 8 .africa domains in the Alexa Top 1 Million and their current rankings are:
- 237,652 publicholidays.africa – a tourism website from Australia hosted in the USA
- 384,753 switchedon.africa – an entertainment portal hosted in South Africa
- 640,974 dronezone.africa – a South African drone store hosted in South Africa
- 726,862 true.africa – parked domain hosted in the USA
- 762,275 paratus.africa – a Namibian telecom company website hosted in Namibia
- 767,231 homecorp.africa – a megastore with a presence in South Africa, Botswana and Namibia; hosted in South Africa
- 815,460 furnmart.africa – a store with a footprint across Botswana, Namibia and South Africa; hosted in South Africa
- 845,832 conic.africa – a Congolese domain reseller website hosted in Germany
Going by Africa’s growing population of over 1.2 billion and that well over 15% of the people have access to the internet, and that a price drop on .africa domains is expected before the end of 2018, one can only project positive growth for .africa as awareness builds around the continent’s top-level domain extension.
[…] for South Africa) as well as some South African city gTLDs (.joburg, .capetown and .durban) and the continental .africa extension. ZACR is Africa’s largest domain registry with over 1.2 million domain names under […]
in morocco we are in just 50.000 .MA registered domains. i’ts good for .africa as a new extension