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As .com shrinks, China adds another 1.2 million domains

Kevin Murphy, February 27, 2025, 05:29:01 (UTC), Domain Registries

The Chinese are still registering huge numbers of domain names, just apparently not in .com, new numbers suggest.

The country’s .cn ccTLD grew by more than 1.2 million domains in the second half of 2024 even as .com shrank and new gTLDs grew, according to the latest stats from local registry CNNIC.

The registry said it had 20,823,037 .cn names at the end of the year, which is 1,261,030 more than it reported for the mid-year point and 721,546 more than it had at the end of 2023.

CNNIC publishes its statistical reports twice a year and the numbers often fluctuate wildly. It’s not usual for .cn to gain or lose millions in the space of six months.

It peaked at over 23 million names in June 2020 and has gone as low as 15 million a year later.

The CNNIC report also says that the number of .com domains registered in the country at the end of the year was 7,047,974, down by 877,515 on the 7,925,489 it had at the end of 2023.

Verisign has partly blamed weakness in China for .com’s decline in several recent quarters.

CNNIC also said that the number of new gTLD domains registered in China at the end of 2024 was 3,640,877, up a whopping 1,574,304 on the 2,066,573 it had at the start of the year.

So that’s roughly 2.3 million net new names across .cn and new gTLDs in 2024, as .com lost almost 900,000.

I humbly suggest price is the driving factor here.

If you want to speculatively or nefariously register junk domains you can reasonably expect to find a new gTLD selling for a buck or two on any given day, but Verisign has been increasing its .com prices every year since the pandemic passed.

Verisign has recently started offering promotional discounts to its registrars, an attempt to return to DUM growth, and it looks like it might be working.

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Comments (2)

  1. David says:
    March 1, 2025 at 4:09 pm

    How sad this article is not sourced! The latest statistics available on CNNIC website are those of Report N°54, published 11/01/24… So where do these stats come from?

    Reply
    • Kevin Murphy says:
      March 1, 2025 at 7:16 pm

      My apologies. Here are the sources:

      Press release published January 17, 2025:

      https://cnnic.cn/n4/2025/0117/c88-11229.html

      “As of December, the total number of domain names was 33.02 million, of which the number of national top-level domain names “.CN” was 20.82 million”

      The 55th Statistical Report:

      https://cnnic.cn/NMediaFile/2025/0220/MAIN1740036167004CKE0DITFO1.pdf

      “As of December 2024, the total number of domain names in my country is 33.02 million. Among them, the number of “.CN” domain names is 20.82 million; the number of “.COM” domain names is 7.05 million; the number of “.中国” domain names is 170,000; and the number of new generic top-level domain names (New gTLD) is 3.64 million.”

      Machine-translated from the original Chinese, but I used two different translation tools so I’m reasonably confident in its accuracy.

      Reply

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