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Domain regs dip for second quarter in a row and it’s all China’s fault
There were 363.5 million domain name registrations across all top-level domains at the end of March, down by 2.8 million names compared to the end of 2020, Verisign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief shows.
But the losses can be attributed mostly to China, which saw plummeting .cn regs in the ccTLD world and big declines across gTLDs popular with Chinese speculators.
In .cn, regs were down a whopping four million at 20.7 million in the quarter. China has historically been subject to steep fluctuations due to local government regulations.
Overall, ccTLD registrations were down 2.4 million at 156.5 million, but that seems to be all down to China.
All the other ccTLDs in the DNIB top 10 were either flat or up slightly on Q4. The frequent wild-card .tk did not have an impact on this quarter’s numbers, staying flat.
Verisign does not break down new gTLD registrations, but zone file and transaction report data shows that the likes of .icu and .wang, which typically sell first-year regs very cheaply, were hit by material junk drops in Q1.
ShortDot’s .icu zone file shrank by 2.5 million names between January 1 and March 30. It’s still in decline in Q2, but the trajectory isn’t nearly as steep. It had 814,000 zone file names at the end of Q1.
Zodiac’s .wang was at 525,000 at the end of 2020 but had dropped to 86,000 by March 30.
.top also lost around half a million names in the first quarter.
The vast majority of regs in .icu, .top and .wang come through Chinese registrars, which often sell for under a dollar for the first year.
The DNIB reports that .com performed well as usual, up from 151.8 million reported in the Q4 report to 154.6 million, but Verisign bedfellow .net was once again flat at 13.4 million.
Domain names are becoming less important in China, which has the world’s largest penetration of mobile Internet.