A first look at .ORG Web Usage

One of the frequent claims about the .ORG price rises is that it is only domainers that will be affected and the non-profits will absorb the costs without questions. Such claims are typically based purely on opinion rather than data. In October 2019, HosterStats.com ran a 150K statistical web usage survey of .ORG to see how the gTLD was being used for the Web Usage chapter of the Domnomics book. (If you haven’t already bought a copy, it is only $9.81 and covers Web usage, Domain Tasting, and how ICANN got its sums wrong on the new gTLDs.) On March 11th, 2020, a second 150K statistical survey was run on 150,000 randomly selected .ORG domain names. The preliminary results are below:

Content: 13%
Templated Content: 25.35% (PPC, For Sale, Affiliate Landers)
Redirects: 26.28%
No Content: 35.36% (No website, No response, holding pages, no content found.)

There are two web usage survey types. The first is the full zone file survey which checks the usage of every domain name. The second is a statistical survey that checks the usage of a random sample of domain names. It is like an opinion poll of usage in that the sample size is large enough to capture how the gTLD is being used. The categories above are simplified categories. The interesting thing is that the “For Sale” percentage on its own was just 2.98%. This is a small percentage. A significant percentage of the redirects are to the HTTPS version of the website.