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.xyz starts to plummet — NetSol freebies to blame?
Kevin Murphy,
June 9, 2015, 15:05:37 (UTC),
Domain Registries
XYZ.com has been seeing its .xyz zone file shrink rapidly over the last five days, likely as a result of free domains pushed out to Network Solutions customers starting to expire.
DI PRO stats show that .xyz has shrunk by 49,658 domains this week — today at 888,413 names compared to a June 4 peak of 942,927.
It was June 4 last year when the industry become aware that NetSol was automatically pushing .xyz names into the accounts of its existing customers without their explicit consent.
Renewal rates usually do not become clear for 45 days after expiration, due to grace periods, but domains can delete earlier.
On June 9, 2014, one year ago today, .xyz had 87,073 domains in its zone file. It’s difficult to see where a loss of almost 50,000 names this week could come from if not the NetSol freebies deleting.
It is believed that the NetSol giveaway contributed about 350,000 names to .xyz’s zone over the period of its offer.
NetSol has been bundling .xyz renewals — which along with the free year of email and privacy comes to a whopping $57 — when it asks its customers to renewal their matching .com/.net/.org domains.
.xyz likely hasn’t seen the worst of its total shrinkage yet.
When eNom pushed free .info domains into its customers’ accounts about 10 years ago the renewal rate on those names was virtually zero.
Interesting that these names would lose their nameservers rather than show a renewal page. Have you been able to find any examples?
I can think of a few reasons NetSol could have deleted some names. What if, for example, the matching .com had expired or transferred away?
Can’t wait for these changes to show up on nTLDstats.com
They’re already showing at Namestat – https://namestat.org/xyz
Has them at 888,000+
The post above tells you what the numbers are.
I see that, so does the link where everybody can get the numbers.
Indeed. Careful not to spam it too much. There is a comment policy here.
1 is too much? It was being helpful, not my site. But if you feel it cuts cuts into your subscriptions, delete it. Or put it in your block so it never shows up again. I’ll put myself on block from this site.
But not where to find them and how they are generated.