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New gTLDs continue growth trend, but can it last?

Kevin Murphy, December 10, 2018, 06:46:44 (UTC), Domain Registries

New gTLDs continued to bounce back following a year-long slump in registration volumes, according to Verisign data.
The company’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief, covering the third quarter, shows new gTLDs growing from 21.8 million names to 23.4 million names, a 1.6 million name increase.
New gTLDs also saw a 1.6 million-name sequential increase in the second quarter, which reversed five quarters of declines.
The sector has yet to surpass its peak of 25.6 million, which it reached in the fourth quarter of 2016.
It think it will take some time to get there, and that we’ll may well see a decline in next couple quarters.
The mid-point of the third quarter marked the end of deep discounting across the former Famous Four Media (now GRS Domains) portfolio (.men, .science, .loan, etc), but the expected downward pressure on volumes wasn’t greatly felt by the end of the period.
With GRS’s portfolio generally on the decline so far in Q4, we might expect it to have a tempering effect on gains elsewhere when the next DNIB is published.
Verisign’s data showed also that ccTLDs shrunk for the first time in a couple years, down by half a million names to 149.3 million. Both .uk and .de suffered six-figure losses.
Its own .net was flat at 14.1 million, showing no signs of recovery after several quarters of shrinkage, while .com increased by two million names to finish September with 137.6 under management.

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Comments (3)

  1. Snoopy says:

    It’d dead. Only hope is more 25 cent Chinese registrations to prop up the bad numbers.

  2. Rob says:

    Why do we continue to measure the health of the industry based on number of names. Most industries measure growth and health by revenue and dollars.
    I am willing to bet if we measured the nTLD industry by revenue, it would not have slumped and would still be growing rapidly.

  3. PLenov says:

    All registry websites for GRS Domains are down. nic.win not available

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