This latest Chinese bubble could deflate ccTLD growth

With many ccTLD operators recently reporting stagnant growth or shrinkage, one registry has performed stunningly well over the last year. Sadly, it bears the hallmarks of another speculative bubble originating in China.
Verisign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief reported that ccTLDs, excluding the never-shrinking anomaly that is .tk, increased by 1.4 million domains in the first quarter of the year.
But it turns out about 1.2 million of those net new domains came from just one TLD: Taiwan’s .tw, operated by TWNIC.
Looking at the annual growth numbers, the DNIB reports that ccTLDs globally grew by 7.8 million names between the ends of March 2018 and March 2019.
But it also turns out that quite a lot of that — over five million names — also came from .tw.
Since August 2018, .tw has netted 5.8 million new registrations, ending May with 6.5 million names.
It’s come from basically nowhere to become the fifth-largest ccTLD by volume, or fourth if you exclude .tk, per the DNIB.
History tells us that when TLDs experience such huge, unprecedented growth spurts, it’s usually due to lowering prices or liberalizing registration policies.
In this case, it’s a bit of both. But mostly pricing.
TWNIC has made it much easier to get approved to sell .tw names if you’re already an ICANN-accredited registrar.
But it’s primarily a steep price cut that TWNIC briefly introduced last August that is behind huge uptick in sales.
Registry CEO Kenny Huang confirmed to DI that the pricing promo is behind the growth.
For about a month, registrants could obtain a one-year Latin or Chinese IDN .tw name for NTD 50 (about $1.50), a whopping 95% discount on its usual annual fee (about $30).
As a result, TWNIC added four million names in August and September, according to registry stats. The vast majority were Latin-script names.
According to China domain market experts Allegravita, and confirmed by Archive.org, one Taiwanese registrar was offering free .tw domains for a day whenever a Chinese Taipei athlete won a gold medal during the Asian Games, which ran over August and September. They wound up winning 17 golds.
Huang said that the majority of the regs came from mainland Chinese registrants.
History shows that big growth spurts like this inevitably lead to big declines a year or two later, in the “junk drop”. It’s not unusual for a registry to lose 90%+ of its free or cheap domains after the promotional first year is over.
Huang confirmed that he’s expecting .tw registrations to drop in the fourth quarter.
It seems likely that later this year we’re very likely going to see the impact of the .tw junk drop on ccTLD volumes overall, which are already perilously close to flat.
Speculative bubbles from China have in recent years contributed to wobbly performance from the new gTLD sector and even to .com itself.

Pritz joins Allegravita and other industry movements

It’s been a busy week in the domain industry for executive changes.
Today, we hear that senior ICANN alum Kurt Pritz has joined Chinese domain marketing specialist Allegravita as a “new partner”.
Allegravita is the PR consultancy that’s made a bit of a splash in the industry over the last couple of years shepherding Western clients through the confusing but potentially lucrative Chinese market.
One of its clients is the Domain Name Association, where Pritz worked as executive director for a couple of years until last October. Prior to the DNA, he was head of ICANN’s new gTLD program.
Also today, Uniregistry announced a couple of new bods in its registrar team.
Sam Tseng and Alan Crowe join from Oversee.net and DomainNameSales (another Frank Schilling company) respectively.
They’ll be responsible for working with high-volume customers of Uniregistry’s registrar business.
Meanwhile, .tickets registry Accent Media said it has appointed Kristi Flax as its commercial operations director.
Flax was founder and COO of PPI Claimline, one of those UK companies that manages refund claims against banks that mis-sold payment protection insurance for people too simple to do it for themselves.
Thanks to relentless phone spamming by unscrupulous lead-gen affiliates, it’s one of the few industries with a worse reputation than domain name industry.
Earlier this week, Sedo announced several changes at the top of its ranks.
First, the Germany-based company has appointed telco industry alum Barbara Stolz as its new CFO. She replaces Torsten Hauschildt, who returns to parent United Internet as senior VP of finance and M&A
Its director of marketing, Christian Voss, has been promoted to chief marketing officer, and Dimo Beitzke has been moved up to chief sales officer. Solomon Amoako has left his job as North American CSO for personal reasons.

Draconian Chinese crackdown puts domain industry at risk

The vast majority of top-level domain registries could soon be banned from selling domains into China due to a reported crackdown under a decade-old law.
That’s according to Allegravita, a company that helps registries with their go-to-market strategies in the country.
Allegravita released a report last week claiming that Chinese registrars will be forbidden to sell domains in TLDs that are not on a government-approved list.
The crackdown could come as early as July, the report says:

Foreign registries which have not applied for Chinese market approval are advised to do so in the near term, as unapproved Top-Level Domains are likely to be taken off the market from July this year.

As of April 30, there were only only 14 TLDs on the approved list. All of them are run by Chinese registries and only five do not use Chinese script.
Not on the list: every legacy gTLD, including .com, as well as every ccTLD apart from .cn.
The Draconian move is actually the implementation of regulations introduced by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology over a decade ago but not really enforced since.
As I reported in December, Donuts was facing problems launching its Chinese-script gTLDs due to this red tape.
MIIT announced in 2012 that new gTLD applicants would need licenses to sell into China.
According to Allegrevita, which until recently was working heavily with TLD Registry (“.chinesewebsite”) on its entry into the country, it’s “no longer ambiguous” that MIIT has asserted full oversight of the domain industry in China.
MIIT’s crackdown appears to be focused on the 93 Chinese registrars it has approved to do business.
Allegravita says these companies will not be allowed to sell unapproved TLD domains to Chinese registrants, but that existing registrations will be grandfathered:

by sometime in July 2015, the MIIT will not permit unapproved registries to operate or offer their domains for sale in China. The MIIT will not interfere with existing domain registrations for unapproved registries; however, new registrations will not be permitted to be sold by Chinese registrars to Chinese registrants.

Presumably, non-Chinese registrars will reap the benefits of this as Chinese would-be registrants look elsewhere to buy their domains.
China is an important market for many registries, particularly the low-cost ones.
Judging by MIIT’s web site, getting approval to sell your TLD in China involves a fairly stringent set of requirements, including having a local presence.
MIIT said in a press release last month that the “special action” is designed “to promote the healthy development of the Internet, to protect China’s Internet domain name system safe and reliable operation