This map of domain names flips the world on its head
On a map of the world scaled to the most popular top-level domains, the Pacific island ofTokelau reigns supreme.
With more than 31 million .tk websites, the tiny New Zealand territory has more domain registrations than any other nation or territory in the world. It might measure just four square miles and have little over 1,400 residents, but Tokelau's .tk dwarfs the rest of the world.
The strange-looking world map, produced by UK domain registry Nominet, shows just how total its dominance is. Tokelau is barely visible on standard world maps, but here it becomes a huge area in the southern Pacific. Russia and America, by comparison, shrink to relative obscurity.
China, the world's most populous nation, is second on the list with 16.8 million registered domains on .cn. Germany (16 million on .de), the United Kingdom (10.6 million for .uk and .co.uk) and the Netherlands (5.6 million for .nl) complete the top five.
The nation with the smallest number of domain registrations? Guinea Bissau (.gw), with two. The tiny size of the United States is due to the relative obscurity of the .us top-level domain, which has just 1,687,108 registrations.
While .com is by far the most popular top-level domain (123 million registrations) it isn't attached to an individual nation. When it was introduced in 1985 it was intended for use by commercial organisations, but has since been opened up for general use.
The popularity of the .tk registration can be traced back to the year 2000, when Dutch entrepreneur Joost Zuurbier founded Freedom Registry (now FreeDom), the registry for .tk domain names.
Zuurbier was looking for a top-level domain that was open to his idea of completely free registration. After much searching, he stumbled upon Tokelau.
Unlike most domains, registering a .tk address doesn't cost anything. Registrations that remain unused for a certain period of time are replaced with ad pages, with paid .tk domains letting people take legal ownership.
FreeDom makes money through adverts placed on lapsed .tk registrations, with a cut of this passed onto the people of Tokelau. In 2012 this cut accounted for one-sixth of its tiny $1.2m annual GDP.
More recently .ml (Mali), .cf (Central African Republic), .ga (Gabon) and .gq (Equatorial Guinea) have all opened themselves up to free registrations.
"Our visualisation of global internet use paints an interesting picture of the domain world," said Nominet CEO Russell Haworth, adding that the high internet adoption rates in Europe gave it a much larger geographical size.
A full-size version of his map, with data for all countries and territories in the world, can be viewed here.
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