Fresh Cloudflare Radar data ranks .su ahead of .com

DNS Magnitude rankings are a surprising way to look at top level domain popularity.

Cloudflare disclosed today that it is publishing fresh data related to top level domains and their popularity.

The fresh section in Cloudflare Radar ranks top level domains by their “DNS Magnitude”, which is a measure of how many unique clients send queries to the TLD. (DNS Magnitude was created by Nic.at). Cloudflare states this can be a more accurate picture of a TLD’s reach since a modest number of sources can generate a sizable number of queries used in traditional volume rankings.

Cloudflare bases its measurements on queries to its 1.1.1.1 resolver.

A surprising finding: .su is really popular.

Yes, the legacy country code for the Soviet Union that ICANN threatened to retire earlier this year. (It has since backed away from these plans, at least for now.)

Depending on the timeframe, .su has a higher DNS Magnitude than even .com, which is baffling.

It seems this is all tied to what Cloudflare Radar’s domain rankings show as the most visited domain in the world, 14emeliaterracewestroxburyma02132 .su. So take it with a grain of salt.

[Update: the .su traffic was part of a botnet.]

The top “fresh” top level domain ranked by DNS Magnitude is Google’s .dev.

One type of domain that performs very well under this metric are dot-brands. .Google, .goog, .apple, and .microsoft are in the top 25.

Cloudflare also has pages for each TLD that show DNS queries, geographical distribution, and certificate data.