Runet's Birthday: On April 7, the .RU domain celebrates its 17th anniversary.
On April 7, Russia's largest national domain, .RU, will turn 17 years old. On this day in 1994, the first Russian domain zone, .RU, was launched. Since then, April 7 has been considered the birthday of the Russian segment of the World Wide Web—Runet. By its seventeenth anniversary, .RU had already surpassed 3,000,000 registered names and entered the top 10 largest national domains in the world.
Today, the .RU domain ranks sixth in terms of the number of registered domains among all national domain zones worldwide, surpassed only by .DE (Germany), .UK (United Kingdom), .CN (China), .NL (Netherlands), and .EU (European Union). In 2010, the absolute increase in the number of .RU domains amounted to 581,204, or 23% of the total number of registered domains. Thus, for two years in a row, the .RU domain has held the leading position in terms of growth rate among national domain zones. The zone continues to grow rapidly: approximately 3,000 new domains are registered daily. The average age of a domain name in the .RU zone is 1 year and 7 months. Currently, the total number of registered .RU domains amounts to more than 3,250,000. The share of delegated (i.e., ready for full operation) domains is more than 85%.
According to the Coordination Center for the National Domain Name System (TLD RU), there are 22 registered .RU domains per 1,000 residents in Russia. By comparison, in Germany and the United Kingdom, whose national domains are the largest in the world, there are approximately 150 national domains per 1,000 residents.
It's worth noting the growing geographic distribution of .RU domain name owners. Approximately 7% of all registered .RU domains belong to citizens and organizations from both the CIS (Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and others) and non-CIS countries (the USA, Israel, Germany, and others).
Among registered domain names, the most popular are trademarks and brands, common and dictionary words, search engine keywords, people's names, abbreviations, and so on. Russian users also notice domain names that are similar in spelling to Russian words written in Latin letters, such as kakao.ru and gyxu.ru.
According to the results of an online survey conducted by Registrar REG.RU among the company's clients in honor of the 17th anniversary of the .RU domain zone, 47% of surveyed .RU domain owners use their domain names for personal purposes, 38% use them to solve their company's business problems, and a small percentage register .RU domains for professional purposes, such as SEO optimization (11%) and for resale (less than 5%).
Respondents rated the following domain name categories as most attractive for personal use: names (surnames, nicknames, etc.), such as ivanov.ru; common English words like beer.ru; and made-up words and word combinations. For businesses, users consider short, memorable two-, three-, and four-character domains, names identical to trademarks and trade names in English, and transliterated Russian words to be the most promising.
The growing popularity of the Russian domain is evidenced by the fact that the majority of respondents (59%) registered their first .RU domain less than five years ago. However, some respondents (10%) have been using the .RU domain for quite a while – more than 10 years.
The overwhelming majority (86%) of survey respondents use their .RU websites to interact with users in Russia and the CIS, while only 14% use the domain to communicate with an international audience. This ratio is confirmed by responses to the question regarding the content of .RU websites: the majority (78%) of respondents' websites are Russian-language. Twenty-two percent of respondents indicated that they use both Russian and English on their websites.
According to REG.RU survey respondents, the .RU domain has good growth prospects. Respondents believe that .RU will remain the primary domain of the Russian internet (41%) or will develop alongside the new .РФ domain (34%). 14% believe that .RU will become one of the top three largest national domain zones globally within a few years. Only 6% believe that .RU will gradually lose ground to international domains, and 5% believe that .РФ will lose ground.
Industry experts support the optimistic development scenario for the domain zone. According to Alexey Korolyuk, CEO of REG.RU, over the past 17 years, the .RU domain has matured, become stable, and earned the trust of Russian internet users: "The .RU domain has become an integral part of not only the Russian but also the global internet. For the international internet community, the .RU domain will undoubtedly remain the primary representative of the Russian segment of the World Wide Web. And within the RuNet, the .RU domain's younger sibling, the Cyrillic domain .РФ, is actively gaining audiences, and both national domains are developing organically together, complementing each other."
