API Domain Distribution Analysis: 6 Findings

Here at TowerData, we’re proud of our email data API. In its role supporting our Email Validation and Email Intelligence services, the TowerData API has a big job. It’s humming along 24/7/365 supporting over 6 billion events a year.

In other words, a lot of data passes through our API, and sometimes we can’t help but get a little curious. Recently, we paused for a moment to take a look at the domain distribution for email addresses across our Intelligence API-and we discovered some interesting data points.

Here are six findings:

• 81.5% of the queries presented a hashed email rather than plain text. While biased a bit by some of our enterprise clients, this one caught us by surprise. It’s great to see the industry continue to move forward with best practices for consumer privacy and data security.

  (Side note: If you’re interested in learning more about this trend, we’ve blogged quite a bit about email hashing over the past few months. You can visit here and here for more on the value and benefits of encrypting your email addresses and common marketing uses for data in this format.)

• Gmail.com is No. 1. OK, so maybe this isn’t that surprising. But we did find a massive 38.6% of the emails presented are from gmail.com
• Hotmail.com, AOL and Comcast round out the top three, in that order.

• Yahoo.com is No. 2. Solid showing at over 20%.
• The unique domain count is 1,196,883. That’s a drop in the bucket compared with the reported 314 million domains in existence globally, according to Verisign. However, it’s still a pretty large number.
• International domains are approximately 2%. Only about 2% of the emails presented were from non-U.S. top-level domains. Unlike Email Validation, our Email Intelligence service is currently only geared toward the United States.

We plan to continue to monitor this and other interesting data points down the road. And we’ll be sure to share as trends develop.

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