Spammy .loan makes Alibaba fastest-growing and fastest-shrinking registrar in June

Chinese registrar Alibaba was both the fastest-growing and fastest-shrinking registrar in June, purely due to its dalliance with hundreds of thousands of cheap .loan domain names.
Stats compiled by DI from the latest monthly registry reports show that Alibaba’s Singapore-based registrar — which has only been active for a year — grew its domains under management by 720,669 in June, almost four times as many as second-placed NameCheap.
The huge increase was due to Alibaba’s DUM in .loan doubling in June, going from from 621,851 to 1,274,532. Another 50,000 extra domains came from .win.
Both .loan and .win are run by registry GRS Domains, the company that replaced Famous Four Media as manager of the Domain Venture Partners gTLD portfolio.
According to SpamHaus, .loan has a “badness” of just shy of 90%, based on a sample size of 45,000 observed domains. SpamHaus has .win at almost 39% bad.
GRS has promised to turn its portfolio around and cut off its deep-discounting promotions effective August 20. The June figures reflect a time when discounts were still in place.
The Singapore Alibaba had DUM of 1,771,730 at the end of June.
At the bottom end of the June league table was a second Alibaba accrediation, Beijing-based Alibaba Cloud Computing (aka HiChina or net.cn), which had a net DUM loss of 266,411, after seeing 345,268 deletes in .loan (along with 45,000 deletes in .xyz and 35,000 in .xin).
The second biggest loser was AlpNames, which is owned by the same people as Famous Four, which deleted over 114,000 names in the month. The vast majority of these names were in FFM/GRS gTLDs, including .loan.
The main, earliest Alibaba accreditation, Alibaba Cloud Computing (Beijing), which has zero exposure to new gTLDs, grew by 69,794 domains to end June as the seventh fastest-growing registrar with DUM of 7,672,594.
As of a couple weeks ago, Alibaba has a fourth ICANN accreditation, Alibaba Cloud US LLC, but that obviously does not figure into the June numbers.
Here’s the top 10 registrars for June by DUM growth:
[table id=52 /]
And the bottom 10:
[table id=53 /]
You may notice that in both tables the net change column is not equal to the sum of adds and net transfers minus deletes. This is because, per ICANN contract, domains still in their five-day Add Grace Period are counted in DUM but not in adds, so many adds slip over into the following month.

At least one in 10 new gTLDs are shrinking

While the universe of new gTLDs is growing at a rapid clip, DI research shows that at least one in 10 individual new gTLDs are shrinking.
Using zone file data, I’ve also established that almost a third of new gTLDs were smaller June 1 than they were 90 days earlier, and that more than one in five shrunk over a 12-month period.
There’s been a lot written recently, here and elsewhere, about the volume boom at the top-end of the new gTLD league tables, driven by the inexplicable hunger in China for worthless domain names, so I thought I’d try to balance it out by looking at those not benefiting from the budget land-grab madness.
It’s been about two and a half years since the first new gTLDs of the 2012 round were delegated. A few hundred were in general availability by the end of 2014.
These are the ones I chose to look at for this article.
Taking the full list of delegated 2012-round gTLDs, I first disregarded any dot-brands. For me, that’s any gTLD that has Specifications 9 or 13 in its ICANN Registry Agreement.
Volume is not a measure of success for dot-brands in general, where only the registry can own names, so we’re not interested in their growth rates.
Then I disregarded any gTLD that had a general availability date after March 14, 2015.
That date was selected because it’s 445 days before June 1, 2016 — enough time for a gTLD to go through its first renewal/deletion cycle.
There’s no point looking at TLDs less than a year old as they can only be growing.
This whittling process left me with 334 gTLDs.
Counting the domains in those gTLDs’ zone files, I found that:

• 96 (28.7%) were smaller June 1 than they were 30 days earlier.
• 104 (31.1%) were smaller June 1 than they were 90 days earlier.
• 76 (22.7%) were smaller June 1 than they were 366 days earlier.
• 35 (10.4%) were smaller on a monthly, quarterly and annual basis.

Zone files don’t include all registered domains, of course, but the proportion of those excluded tends to be broadly similar between gTLDs. Apples-to-apples comparisons are, I believe, fair.
And I think it’s fair to say that if a gTLD has gotten smaller over the previous month, quarter and year, that gTLD is “shrinking”.
There are the TLDs.
[table id=42 /]
Concerning those 35 shrinking gTLDs:

• The average size of the zones, as of June 1, was 17,299 domains.
• Combined, they accounted for 605,472 domains, down 34,412 on the year. That’s a small portion of the gTLD universe, which is currently over 20 million.
• The smallest was .wed, with 144 domains and annual shrinkage of 12. The largest was .网址 (Chinese for “.website”) which had 330,554 domains and annual shrinkage of 7,487.
• The mean shrinkage over the year was 983 domains per gTLD. Over the quarter it was 1,025. Over the month it was 400.

Sixteen of the 35 domains belong to Donuts, which is perhaps to be expected given that it has the largest stable and was the most aggressive early mover.
Of its first batch of seven domains to go to GA, way back in February 2014, only three — .guru, .singles, and .plumbing — are on our list of shrinkers.
A Donuts spokesperson told DI today that its overall number of registrations is on the increase and that “too much focus on individual TLDs doesn’t accurately indicate the overall health of the TLD program in general and of our portfolio specifically.”
He pointed out that Donuts has not pursued the domainer market with aggressive promotions, targeting instead small and medium businesses that are more likely to actually use their domains.
“As initial domainer investors shake out, you’re likely to see some degradation in the size of the zone,” he said.
He added that Donuts has seen second-year renewal rates of 72%, which were higher than the first year.
“That indicates that there’s more steadiness in the registration base today than there was when first-year renewals were due,” he said.

.xxx boss says new gTLD registries need to “wake up”

ICM Registry president Stuart Lawley may be just weeks away from launching his second and third gTLD registries, but that doesn’t mean he has a positive outlook on new gTLDs in general.
“I think people need to wake up,” he told DI in a recent interview. “If you do the math on some of these numbers and prospective numbers, it just doesn’t stack up for a profitable business.”
“The new ‘Well Done!’ number seems to be a lot less than it was six months ago or 12 months ago,” he said.
Lawley said he’s among the most “bearish” in the industry when it comes to new gTLD prospects. And that goes for ICM’s own .porn, .sex and .adult, which are due to launch between March and September this year.
While he’s sure they’ll be profitable, and very bullish on the search engine optimization benefits that he says registrants could be able to achieve, he’s cautious about what kind of registration volumes can be expected. He said:

If you add up everybody that has ever bought a .xxx name, including the Sunrise B defensives, we have got a target market of about 250,000 names. People to go back to and say, “Look, you still have a .xxx or you had a .xxx at some stage. Therefore, we think you may be interested in buying .porn, .sex or .adult for exactly the same reasons.”
So, our expectations to sell to a whole new market outside of those quarter of a million names is probably quite limited.

Lawley said that he believes that the relatively poor volume performance of most new gTLDs over the last year will cause many registrars to question whether it’s worth their time and money to offer them.

I can see why registrars can’t be bothered. How many of these am I going to sell? Am I going to sell two hundred of them? Am I going to make five dollars per name? That’s one thousand dollars. It’s not worth it to me to put in ten thousand dollars worth of labor and effort to make one thousand dollars in revenue. So, I think that’s a challenge that many of the small lone player TLDs may face.

Lawley said he’s skeptical about the ability of major portfolio players, such as Donuts, to effectively market their hundreds of gTLDs, many of which are targeted at niche vertical markets.
He said in an ideal world a gTLD would need to spend $20 million to $30 million a year for a few years in order to do a proper PR job on a single TLD — ICM spent about $8 million to $9 million, $5.5 million of which was on US TV spots — and that’s just not economically viable given how many names are being sold.
But he added that he thinks it’s a good thing that some new gTLDs are seeing a steady and fairly linear number of daily additions, saying it might point to better long-term stability.

A lot of the TLDs that seem to be doing okay — .club for argument’s sake and several others in that ilk — seem to be doing their three hundred domains per day ADD, or 32 or 12 or whatever the number is, in a relatively linear fashion six or seven months after launch, which I think is potentially positive if one extrapolates that out.

The full interview, which also addresses SEO, dot-brands, registrar pay-for-placement and smart search, can be read by DI PRO subscribers here.

Track all the popular new gTLD domains on DI

Want to get a full daily list of which new gTLD domains have Alexa rank?
From today DI PRO subscribers can, with our new Popular New gTLD Domains feature.
Updated once a day, the report comprises a list of new gTLD domains that are used by the top one million web sites on the internet, according to data provided by Alexa.
The report currently has 635 domains, but it’s growing.
The report can be used to discover how early adopters are using new gTLDs and which TLDs are generating the most popular web sites.
Here’s a screen shot:

DI PRO subscribers can check it out here.

New gTLDs pass 200,000 registrations

The number of domain names in new gTLDs passed 200,000 last night, according to zone files.
The exact number, according to the DI PRO database, is 201,184.
It’s based on incremental organic growth over the last week since the last batch of new gTLDs went into general availability, rather than any big launch events or surges.
Here are the top 10 zones, all of which belong to Donuts.
[table id=28/]
What the 200,000 count does not reflect is the first day of general availability for Google’s first-to-launch gTLD, .みんな (Japanese for “everyone”), which I’m expecting to start showing numbers tomorrow.
In related news, the DI PRO new gTLD zone file league table service (here) was upgraded today to make it a bit more useful during periods of patchy data availability.
The service will now show all delegated new gTLDs that have started publishing zone files, along with the most-recent domain counts, on days when the file was for whatever reason not available.

Track new gTLD growth on DI PRO

DI PRO subscribers from today can track daily changes in new gTLD registration volumes.
The New gTLD Zone File Report is a simple, sortable table showing how each new gTLD has performed over the last 24 hours.
It’s the database I’ve been using for DI’s analysis of Donuts’ landrush numbers over the last week, but I’ve received a few requests to make the data available in a more structured way.

The data is also being incorporated into the next TLD Health Check update too, enabling longer-term views and interactive charts. More on that in due course.
DI PRO subscribers also receive access to the New gTLD Application Tracker, a calendar of crucial new gTLD launch dates, the New gTLD Collisions Database and many more useful services.

These are the top 50 name collisions

Having spent the last 36 hours crunching ICANN’s lists of almost 10 million new gTLD name collisions, the DI PRO collisions database is back online, and we can start reporting some interesting facts.
First, while we reported yesterday that 1,318 new gTLD applicants will be asked to block a total of 9.8 million unique domain names, the number of distinct second-level strings involved is somewhat smaller.
It’s 6,806,050, according to our calculations, still a bewilderingly high number.
The most commonly blocked string, as expected, is “www”. It’s on the block-lists for 1,195 gTLDs, over 90% of the total.
Second is “2010”. I currently have no explanation for this, but I’m wondering if it’s an artifact of the years of Day In The Life data upon which ICANN based its lists.
Protocol-related strings such as “wpad” and “isatap” also rank highly, as do strings matching popular TLDs such as “com”, “org”, “uk” and “de”. Single-character strings are also very popular.
The brand with the most blocks (free trademark protection?) is unsurprisingly Google.
The string “google” appears as an exact match on 930 gTLDs’ lists. It appears as a substring of 1,235 additional blocked strings, such as “google-toolbar” and “googlemaps”.
Facebook, Yahoo, Gmail, YouTube and Hotmail also feature in the top 100 blocked brands.
DI PRO subscribers can search for strings that interest them, discovering how many and which gTLDs they’re blocked in, using the database.
Here’s a table of the top 50 blocked strings.
[table id=22 /]

Search all new gTLD collision block lists

DI PRO subscribers can now see which strings appear most often in new gTLD registries’ block-lists and search for strings — such as trademarks or premium strings — that interest them.
We’ve just launched the New gTLD Collisions Database.
Currently, it indexes all 14,493 unique strings that ICANN has told the first 13 new gTLD registries to block — due to the risk of collisions with internal networks — when they launch.
By default the strings are ranked by how many gTLDs have been told to block them.
You’ll see immediately that “www” is currently blocked in all 13 registries, suggesting that it’s likely to be blocked in the vast majority of new gTLDs.
Users can also search for a string in order to see how many, and which, new gTLDs are going to have to block it.
We’re hoping that the service will prove useful to trademark owners that want to see which “freebie” blocked strings they stand to benefit from, and in which gTLDs.
For example, we can already see that 10 meaningful strings containing “nike” are to be blocked. For “facebook”, it’s four registries. For “google”, it’s currently three strings across six gTLDs.
The service will also hopefully be useful to registries that want to predict which strings ICANN may tell them to block. We’re seeing a lot of gambling terms showing up in non-gambling TLDs, for example.
Here’s a screenshot of sample output for the search “cars”.

As ICANN publishes lists for more gTLDs, the database will grow and become more useful and time-saving.
Comments, suggestions and bug reports as always to kevin@domainincite.com

New gTLD Application Tracker 3.0 launched

While we’ve added several smaller requested features to the DI PRO New gTLD Application Tracker over the last few months, the time has come for the second big update to the service.
Subscribers have asked for a number of changes and upgrades to make it easier to quickly get at the data they need, and we’re happy to oblige.
The Application Tracker, has been updated in three areas.
New “Current Status” Tab
Talking to subscribers over the last few weeks, it became clear that different people are using the Application Tracker in different ways for different reasons.
Some want to be able to find out if, for example, an application has ever been objected to or received GAC advice, while others only want to know whether those objections and advice are still active.
From today, both use cases are made easier with the introduction of a new Current Status tab.
Searches conducted under this tab automatically filter out all withdrawn and rejected applications. If a contention set has been won, the winner will not display as contested in results.
Similarly, if an application managed to fight its way through objections or GAC advice, it will show as unopposed and unencumbered in search results pages.

Subscribers who want to carry on using the service to access historical information about applications can continue to use the previous version of the Application Tracker under the new “Original Status” tab.
Full IE Results
The existing IE Results database has been folded into the Application Tracker under a new tab, and there’s also a new option to see the full scores for each application that has passed through Initial Evaluation.
The new IE Results (Detailed) tab shows the scores each application received for each of the 27 Applicant Guidebook questions for which scores are made available
The Basic tab shows the financial and technical evaluation subtotals along with other information about the applicant and back-end provider.
New Search Options
With ICANN’s publication of Interilse Consulting’s report into the potential security risks of new gTLDs last week, each string was assigned a risk profile: Low, High or Uncalculated.
The database was updated with this information the same day it was published, but now you can search on it too, choosing to limit your search to, or omit, any of the three classes.
You can now also search for, or exclude, applications that have been rejected by ICANN. There are only three such applications right now, but I’m sure this option will become more useful in future.
Past and Future Updates
For details of all the original features of the Application Tracker, see this April blog post. For DI PRO subscription information, click here.
Subscribers can send suggestions for future updates to kevin@domainincite.com, as always.

See all new gTLD withdrawls and Initial Evaluation results in a handy timeline

From today, DI PRO users have a new feature for tracking new gTLD withdrawals that removes the huge pain and inconvenience of actually having to read DI and other domain blogs.
It’s been the mostly commonly requested feature over the last couple of weeks, and we’re happy to oblige.
The New gTLD Program Timeline lists all withdrawals, evaluation results and other major changes to application status, in chronological order.
There are over 1,100 entries in the database so far, going back to August 2012. Withdrawals are automatically updated daily, IE results weekly on Friday evenings UTC.
It’s designed for utility. Here’s a screen grab:

To join the growing ranks of DI PRO subscribers click here. Subscribers also get access to the following tools and searchable databases:
Daily new gTLD program stats, searchable Initial Evaluation scores, the most comprehensive and flexible database of gTLD applications available anywhere, and much more.