At the end of 2021, a total of 17,160,504 .de domains was recorded in the DENIC database. 1,695,256 of these are held by persons that are resident beyond the German borders. Within one year, the number of international registrations has increased by 244,000, nearly double the rate of the preceding year (2020: 128,000).
Related to the overall inventory of .de domains, the share of registrations from other countries than Germany is 9.88 percent. One year ago, it had been 8.7 percent. The German domain ending has been getting more popular consistently everywhere in the world for years, and the domain holders are distributed all around the globe.
The largest share of the international .de domains is registered by domain holders resident in the United States. They account for 21 percent or 360,000 .de domains. Nearly twice as many holders with a total of 656,000 .de domains come from six European countries: the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Great Britain, Portugal and France. Their share in international .de domains is 38.7 percent, a plus of 3.6 percent within one year. The percentage value of the non-European countries represented among the top ten, in contrast, has remained nearly unchanged over the last year with roughly 16 percent. The percentage of .de registrations by domain holders from the remaining countries dropped by 2.6 percent in 2021, but continued to increase in absolute figures by 21,000 to a total of 401,000 domains.
Despite the strong increase in .de domains with international holders, more than 90 percent of .de domains are registered in Germany. With nearly 15.5 million domains with German-based holders, the market share of .de accounts for about 60 percent and thus, .de remains the undisputed market leader in the German domain market.
