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Q3 industry growth driven by .tk, .com and .icu

Kevin Murphy, December 20, 2019, Domain Registries

The domain name industry grew by 5.1 million names in the third quarter, according to the latest Domain Name Industry Brief from Verisign.
September ended with 359.8 million names across the board, the DNIB (pdf) shows.
Half of the growth came from Tokelau’s .tk, which is handed out for free by Freenom and is where domains never delete. It grew by 2.6 million names to 25.1 million in the quarter.
Next biggest grower was Verisign’s own .com, which grew by 1.5 million names to end September with an even 144 million. Its red-headed sibling, .net, lost 200,000 names over the same period and ended the quarter on 13.4 million.
Excluding .com and .tk leaves just one million names worth of net growth across the remainder of the industry, which comprises another 1,515 TLDs.
Taiwan’s .tw, which has been going through a bit of a spurt over the last year or so, added 300,000 domains, but .uk, which was a driver in Q2, was flat at 13.3 million.
New gTLDs grew by one million during the quarter, ending at 24 million, according to the DNIB.
That appears to have been driven almost entirely by ShortDot’s cheapo .icu, which has been flying off the shelves in China all year. Zone file records show it added over a million domains in Q3. It currently has 4.2 million names in its zone.
When these domains start to drop, it will likely be on a scale to materially affect the overall industry numbers in future DNIBs.

Domain growth slows a lot in Q1

Kevin Murphy, July 19, 2017, Domain Registries

The growth of the domain name industry slowed in the first quarter, numbers published today by Verisign reveal.
According to its latest Domain Name Industry Brief (pdf), the domain universe grew to 330.6 million in Q1.
That’s an increase of 1.3 million names on Q4 2016, a 0.4% sequential increase, and 11.8 million names, 3.7% growth, compared to Q1 2016.
In the Q4 DNIB, Verisign reported industry growth of 0.7% and 6.8% respectively.
The only change on the list of the top 10 TLDs was that .nl and .xyz switched places (.xyz is now in 10th place, with 5.6 million names, but this rank will not last long).
ccTLDs in general did not match the growth of the overall market. There were approximately 143.1 million ccTLD domains at the end of March, up 0.3% sequentially and 1.7% year over year, both substantially smaller numbers than reported in Q4.
The free ccTLD .tk, which has been responsible for huge swings in recent reports, is reported to have declined by about 100,000 names to 18.6 million.
Excluding .tk, the growth rate of ccTLDs was better — 0.5% sequentially and 3.9% compared to the year-ago quarter.
Verisign’s data is largely based on zone files for gTLDs and independent researcher ZookNic for ccTLDs.