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To be or not to be online? If anyone ever doubted the need to digitise their business, COVID proved that the answer to this slightly paraphrased Shakespeare’s question is: TO BE! The .LV annual data report proves that every crisis can become a beginning of something new.
In 2021, the total number of .LV domain names increased by 5.7%. Over the full twelve months, 40202 new .LV domain names were registered. The numbers of new registrations were high, particularly, during the first quarter of 2021, but will this lust for digitisation continue at the same rate in 2022? Time will show.
Consumer behaviour is changing, and businesses are following this shift. The year 2021 was a success for entrepreneurs with locally oriented website names, as well as those who tailored their approach to each market.
Based on Alexa ranks, the popularity of .LV websites has grown by 8% over the year. 40% of the TOP 500 ranked websites in Latvia are local .LV websites. The tendency to choose a website with a locally oriented domain name is not unique only to Latvia but can be observed elsewhere in Europe too.
The options for a contemporary entrepreneur are truly vast. Any creator of a new homepage can choose to register its name in one (or several) of the 1500 extensions or top-level domains. You can view a list of all available extensions - https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db.
We are glad to see that Latvian businessmen and residents are patriotic. The domain name extension market in Latvia is dominated by the local ccTLD.
Since March 2004, NIC.LV has offered a possibility to register Latvian domain names – domain names that also contain characters with diacritical marks - ā, ē, ī, ū, ō, ķ, ļ, ņ, ŗ, ģ, š, č, ž.
By the end of 2021, 3082 Latvian domain names were registered under .LV, showing a 144% growth compared to the year before.
Unfortunately, in 2021, the rapidly growing interest in Latvian domain names was abused by local domain squatters. They registered and later sold for a much higher price Latvian versions of the most popular local website names. Local businesses who advertised themselves with a website name in Latvian, but in reality had registered only its traditional version, were the first to feel the consequences.
Naturally, .LV domain names are primarily registered by individuals and legal entities from Latvia. However, a significant proportion - 30000 .LV domain names - are registered by foreign individuals and legal entities. Currently, the share of foreign domain name holders is 25%.
For many years, Germany was the most active foreign registrant, maintaining a steady growth of around 3% each year. But 2021 brought in changes, moving our neighbour Lithuania into the top spot, with an astonishing 12% growth over the last year! Now, about 3% of all .LV domain names are registered by Lithuanian entrepreneurs.
In 2021, the total number of .LV domain name holders increased by 3%. The average number of domain names registered per user is 1.7. The ratio between legal entities and individuals remains unchanged - almost 60% of all domain names are registered by legal entities, while 40% - by individuals.
.LV registrars are NIC.LV collaboration partners, who can help you register the .LV domain name of your choice as well as offer all the necessary support for your website, e-mail address, etc. You can check the list of our accredited .LV registrars here.
DNSSEC is a Domain Name Systems security extension that provides authentication for DNS data. NIC.LV signed .LV zone with DNSSEC in 2012 and since then offers DNSSEC service to registrants and registrars.
Despite the growth of the .LV domain and the high DNSSEC deployment in 2020, we can observe a reduction in the number of DNSSEC-secured .LV domain names in 2021.