CENTR: domain growth now slowest EVER
The number of registered domain names in the world is growing at its slowest rate ever, according to CENTR.
Its latest CENTRstats Global TLD Report, covering the first quarter of 2019, shows median domain growth of 3.4% year-over-year, a “record low”.
That stat peaked at 29.8% in the third quarter of 2015, according to the report. That was when the first significant wave of new gTLDs were hitting the market.
The 3.4% figure is the median growth rate across the top 500 TLDs CENTR tracks.
The group tracks 1,486 TLDs in total, a little under the 1,531 currently in the root, ignoring TLDs that are too small or have unreliable data.
The report says that growth rates are similar across ccTLDs and gTLDs, though gTLDs seem to be faring slightly better.
The median growth rate of the top 300 gTLDs was 4.1%.
For ccTLDs, the percentage growth varied between regions, from 1.4% in the Americas to 6.3% in the still much smaller African markets.
CENTR estimates that there were 351 million registered domains at the end of the quarter.
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May hit negatives numbers within 5-10 years, mainly pushed in that direction by ntlds and cctlds.