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Domain universe shrinks again: .com and .cn down, .au up

Kevin Murphy, December 9, 2022, 08:33:57 (UTC), Domain Registries

The number of registered domain names in the world shrank again in the third quarter, with mixed results across various TLDs, according to Verisign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief.

There were 349.9 million names across all TLDs at the end of September, down 1.6 million sequentially but up 11.5 million compared to Q3 2021, the DNIB states.

The industry has downsized in every quarter this year, judging by Verisign’s numbers.

The company’s own .com, suffering from post-Covid blues, macroeconomic factors and (possibly) pricing issues, dragged the overall number down in Q3 by 200,000 domains, ending with 160.9 million.

But China’s .cn was hit harder, ending the period down from 20.6 million to 18 million. As I pondered in September, this may be due to how Verisign sources data.

Australia’s .au benefited from the launch of second-level availability, which boosted its number by 400,000 domains, ending with 4 million and overtaking .fr and .eu to become the seventh-largest ccTLD.

The ccTLD world overall shrunk sequentially by 1.7 million names but grew by 5.7 million on the year to end the quarter with 132.4 million.

New gTLDs ended with 27.3 million names, up 300,000 sequentially and 3.8 million year over year.

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Comments (3)

  1. Alessio says:

    Interesting .au as a tld has had as much uptake since similar efforts abroad havent seemed to go far

  2. MapleDots says:

    And the price increase on .com’s had nothing to do with it. Nah, it did not affect investors at all. With greed comes the consequences!

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