New gTLDs rebound in Q2

New gTLD registration volumes reversed a long trend of decline in the second quarter, according to Verisign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief.

The DNIB (pdf), published late last week, shows new gTLD domains up by 1.6 million sequentially to 21.8 million at the end of June, a 7.8% increase.

That’s the first time Verisign’s numbers have shown quarterly growth for new gTLDs since December 2016, five quarters of shrinkage ago.

The best-performing new gTLD across Q2 was .top according to my zone file records, adding about 600,000 names.

.top plays almost exclusively into the sub-$1 Chinese market and is regularly singled out as a spam-friendly zone. SpamHaus currently ranks it as almost 45% “bad”.

Overall, the domain universe saw growth of six million names, or 1.8%, finishing the quarter at 339.8 million names, according to Verisign.

Verisign’s own .com ended Q2 with 135.6 million domains, up from 133.9 million at the end of March.

That’s a sequential increase of 1.7 millions, only 100,000 more than the total net increase from the new gTLD industry.

.net is still suffering, however, flat in the period with 14.1 million names.

ccTLDs saw an increase of 3.5 million names, up 2.4%, to end June at 149.7 million, the DNIB states.

But that’s mainly as a result of free TLD .tk, which never deletes names. Stripping its growth out (Verisign and partner ZookNic evidently have access to .tk data now) total ccTLD growth would only have been 1.9 million names.

Industry report show slightly stronger growth than Verisign’s

The latest domain name industry growth figures from CENTR show slightly better performance than a recent report from Verisign covering the same period.

CENTR says in its latest DomainWire Global TLD Report there were 331.1 million registered domains at the end of 2017, whereas Verisign, in its Domain Name Industry Brief last month, put that at 332.4 million domains.

But CENTR’s figures show growth of 1.2% compared to the end of 2016, a figure Verisign put at 0.9%.

The CENTR report shows growth in ccTLDs offset by a 0.4% decline in gTLD registrations. The drag factors for gTLDs were largely .net, .xyz and .top.

CENTR and Verisign use mostly the same sources for their data — published zone files for gTLDs and cooperative ccTLDs, and independent researcher Zooknic to plug the gaps — but they vary in how they calculate their growth numbers.

For example, Verisign said .com ended the year with 131.9 million names, but CENTR puts that number at 130.4 million. It looks to me like Verisign counts registered domains that do not appear in the .com zone file to get to its total.

In addition, CENTR excludes dot-brand gTLDs, gTLDs with fewer than 500 domains, and ccTLDs that do not provide reliable quarter-to-quarter data from its calculations.

The CENTR report can be downloaded here.

Domain universe grows almost 1% in 2017 despite new gTLD slump

The total number of registered domain names in all TLDs was up 0.9% in 2017, despite a third-quarter dip, according to the latest data compiled by Verisign.

The latest Domain Name Industry Brief, published yesterday, shows that there were 332.4 million domains registered at the end of the year.

That’s up by 1.7 million names (0.5%) on the third quarter and up 3.1 million names (0.9%) on 2016.

Growth is growth, but when you consider that 2015-2016 growth was 6.8%, under 1% appears feeble.

The drag factors in 2017 were of course the 2012-round new gTLDs and Verisign’s own .net, offset by increases in .com and ccTLDs.

New gTLD domains were 20.6 million at the end of the year, down by about 500,000 compared to the third quarter and five million names compared to 2016.

As a percentage of overall registrations, new gTLDs dropped from 7.8% at the end of 2016 to 6.2%.

The top 10 new gTLDs now account for under 50% of new gTLD regs for the first time.

The numbers were primarily affected by big declines in high-volume spaces such as .xyz, which caused the domain universe to actually shrink in Q3.

Verisign’s own .com fared better, as usual, with .net suffering a decline.

The year ended with 131.9 million .com names, up by five million names on the year, exactly offsetting the shrinkage in new gTLDs.

But .net ended up with 14.5 million names, a 800,000 drop on 2016.

In the ccTLD world, total regs were up 1.4 million (1%) quarterly and 3.4 million (2.4%) annually.

Excluding wild-card ccTLD .tk, which never deletes domains and for which data for 2017 was not available to Verisign, the growth was a more modest 0.7 million (0.5%) quarterly and 2.3 million (1.8%) annually.

The DNIB report for Q4 2017 can be downloaded here (pdf).

XYZ junk drop sinks the industry in Q3

The total number of domains registered in the world suffered a rare period of decline in the third quarter, according to Verisign’s latest numbers.

The Q3 Domain Name Industry Brief shows September ended with 330.7 million registered names across all TLDs, a 1.2 million dip on the second quarter.

Year-on-year, there was still growth: 3.7 million domains, or 1.1%.

The shrinkage follows a flat Q2 and a slowing Q1.

The finger of blame can be primarily pointed at .xyz and .top, which lost millions of domains in the quarter due, in .xyz’s case at least, to the expiration of millions of names that had been sold for a penny or two a year earlier.

Not that you’d know this from the DNIB (pdf). For some reason Verisign doesn’t like talking about new gTLD growth rates in its reports, even when they’re going the wrong way.

Verisign’s own .com and .net grew by 1.5 million names to 145.8 million, putting ground between themselves and ccTLDs, which collectively were up by 500,000 names or 0.3% sequentially to 144.7 million.

Domain growth flat in Q2

Growth in the volume of registered domain names was exactly the same in the second quarter as it was in the first.

That’s according to the latest Domain Name Industry Brief, published by Verisign late last week.

Q2 closed with 331.9 million registered names, up 1.3 million or 0.4% sequentially. The Q1 DNIB published three months ago also showed net growth of 1.3 million names.

That’s an increase of 6.7 million names, 2.1%, over the second quarter 2016, which compares unfavorably to the first quarter’s annual growth of 11.8 million names.

A slight majority of the 1.3 million bump seems to have come from .com and .net, which together grew from 143.6 million to 144.3 million names, roughly a 700,000 name or 0.4% sequential increase.

ccTLDs fared a little better, going to to 144.2 million names from 143.1 million in Q1. That’s a 1.1 million increase.

New gTLDs took the edge off the overall industry growth, shrinking from 25.4 million names in Q1 to 24.3 million in Q2.

That’s largely due to the expiration of millions of speculative .xyz registrations that were given away for free or nearly free in 2016.

As anticipated, .xyz fell off the top 10 list of all TLDs to be replaced by 17-year-old .info, which added an impressive 300,000 names to wind up in the #9 spot ahead of flat Netherlands ccTLD .nl.