
The .berlin new gTLD has retained its position as the most successful Digital City Brand in 2021 according to the fifth edition of DOTZON’s Digital City Brands study.
The study compared the 36 cities worldwide with their own digital identities. The study shows after .berlin came .tokyo and then .nyc (New York City) in third place. This year’s newcomers in the top 10 are .miami and .brussels. However, last year’s number six, .moscow, and last year’s number nine, .wien, did not make it into the top 10 this year.
To come up with its ranking DOTZON used the following eight key performance indicators: number of registered domain names, annual sales volume, number of active domain names, number of pages per domain listed by Google, number of domains listed in the Alexa and Majestic rankings, number of domain names per 1,000 inhabitants, the gross domestic product per domain name and finally a comparison between the cityTLD and the national top-level domain (ccTLD). The figures used are all from public databases and local parameters specific to a city. They specify the strengths and assets of the cities.

The top ranking cityTLD, .berlin, was the first launched to the public and ranked good to very good among almost all KPIs with almost 50,000 registered domain names and a number of high traffic domain names according to Amazon’s Alexa ranking and Majestic.
Reconquering second position was .tokyo with close to 170,000 registrations, the largest on this count, as well as 22 domains in the Alexa ranking and 53 domains in the Majestic ranking. It also performs almost as well as .jp in registrations.
Up from fourth to third in this year’s study was New York City’s .nyc, which ranks highly in the Alexa and Majestic rankings: 23 and 91 domains in the top 1 million rankings. It is also more popular than .us in the city.
Fourth was .amsterdam, which made the top 10 for the fourth time and ranked well in most of the eight categories, including for domains per capita (27 per 1,000 residents) coming second, as well as fifth in the “turnover of the cityTLD” and fourth in the “gross domestic product per domain name” categories.
Moving on up was .koeln from tenth to fifth with 23 domains per 1,000 residents, 25,930 domains and top position in the “gross domestic product per domain name” category.
Rounding out the top 10 were .miami, up from sixteenth to sixth, with 35 domains per 1,000 residents and the highest rank compared to its ccTLD (.us), .hamburg with a high revenue of around US$750,000, .london down to eighth from fifth with around 47,000 domains in June and the third highest revenue (US$1.4million) as well as the third-most domains in the Alexa and Majestic rankings. Coming in ninth was .paris, making the top ten for the second time ranking sixth in the Alexa and Majestic rankings with six and 26 domains, and another sixth place in the category “annual sales volume” with about USD $650,000 while tenth was .brussels, listed as a big “surprise”, jumping two places to make the top 10 for the first time, coming third for “number of pages per domain listed at Google”, as well as the ninth place in the “Alexa and Majestic ranking” category.
There is a more detailed summary of the above in English (here) and the study was originally published in German (here).