A third of the top TLDs are shrinking

Roughly one hundred of the top 300 top-level domains shrank in the second quarter, according to the latest CENTRstats Global TLD Report.
Median growth in domain registrations “hit a new recorded low” of 3.1%, the second new low in a row, CENTR said. It was 5.6% a year ago.
At the high end of the range, African ccTLDs — which have a relatively low base reg count, making impressive percentage growth easier — had median growth of 8.5%.
At the low end, European ccTLDs had median growth of 2%, CENTR said. These ccTLDs have more regs than all the other regions combined, making high-percentage growth trickier.
Europe was of course helped out by the UK, which spiked in July due to the end of the five-year second-level domain claims period, an effect I reported on last week.
Judging by CENTR’s numbers, Europe would have been virtually flat had .uk not grown by 1.1 million names in the quarter.
CENTR does not seem to count Taiwan’s .tw, the other ccTLD known to have driven growth internationally in Q2.
Verisign’s Domain Name Industry Brief, and DI’s own database, has Taiwan as the eighth-largest TLD, but it does not even make it to the CENTRstats’s top 10. (UPDATE September 9: .tw has since been added to the list.)
The gTLDs fared little better in percentage terms — up 2.4% year-over-year at the end of July. Verisign’s .com grew at 5% over the same period. For 2012-round new gTLDs, the number is 2.8%.
The CENTRstats report, which contains a whole lot more data, can be viewed or downloaded here.

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.

Industry report show slightly stronger growth than Verisign’s

The latest domain name industry growth figures from CENTR show slightly better performance than a recent report from Verisign covering the same period.
CENTR says in its latest DomainWire Global TLD Report there were 331.1 million registered domains at the end of 2017, whereas Verisign, in its Domain Name Industry Brief last month, put that at 332.4 million domains.
But CENTR’s figures show growth of 1.2% compared to the end of 2016, a figure Verisign put at 0.9%.
The CENTR report shows growth in ccTLDs offset by a 0.4% decline in gTLD registrations. The drag factors for gTLDs were largely .net, .xyz and .top.
CENTR and Verisign use mostly the same sources for their data — published zone files for gTLDs and cooperative ccTLDs, and independent researcher Zooknic to plug the gaps — but they vary in how they calculate their growth numbers.
For example, Verisign said .com ended the year with 131.9 million names, but CENTR puts that number at 130.4 million. It looks to me like Verisign counts registered domains that do not appear in the .com zone file to get to its total.
In addition, CENTR excludes dot-brand gTLDs, gTLDs with fewer than 500 domains, and ccTLDs that do not provide reliable quarter-to-quarter data from its calculations.
The CENTR report can be downloaded here.

China and cheapo TLDs drag down industry growth — CENTR

The growth of the worldwide domain industry continued to slow in the third quarter, according to data out today from CENTR.
There were 311.1 million registered domains across over 1,500 TLDs at the end of September, according to the report, 0.7% year-over-year growth.
The new gTLD segment, which experienced a 7.2% decline to 20.6 million names, was the biggest drag.
But that decline is largely due to just two high-volume, low-price gTLDs — .xyz and .top — which lost millions of names that had been registered for pennies apiece.
Excluding these TLDs, year-over-year growth for the whole industry would have been 2.5%, CENTR said. The report states:

Over the past 2 years, quarterly growth rates have been decreasing since peaks in early 2016. The slowdown is the result of deletes after a period of increased investment from Chinese registrants. Other explanations to the slowdown are specific TLDs, such as .xyz and .top, which have contracted significantly.

The legacy gTLDs inched up by 0.2%, largely driven by almost two million net new names in .com. In fact, only five of the 17 legacy gTLDs experienced any growth at all, CENTR said.
In the world of European ccTLDs, the average (median) growth rate has been flat, but CENTR says it sees signs of a turnaround.
CENTR is the Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries. Its Q3 report can be downloaded here (pdf).

At least one in 10 new gTLDs are shrinking

While the universe of new gTLDs is growing at a rapid clip, DI research shows that at least one in 10 individual new gTLDs are shrinking.
Using zone file data, I’ve also established that almost a third of new gTLDs were smaller June 1 than they were 90 days earlier, and that more than one in five shrunk over a 12-month period.
There’s been a lot written recently, here and elsewhere, about the volume boom at the top-end of the new gTLD league tables, driven by the inexplicable hunger in China for worthless domain names, so I thought I’d try to balance it out by looking at those not benefiting from the budget land-grab madness.
It’s been about two and a half years since the first new gTLDs of the 2012 round were delegated. A few hundred were in general availability by the end of 2014.
These are the ones I chose to look at for this article.
Taking the full list of delegated 2012-round gTLDs, I first disregarded any dot-brands. For me, that’s any gTLD that has Specifications 9 or 13 in its ICANN Registry Agreement.
Volume is not a measure of success for dot-brands in general, where only the registry can own names, so we’re not interested in their growth rates.
Then I disregarded any gTLD that had a general availability date after March 14, 2015.
That date was selected because it’s 445 days before June 1, 2016 — enough time for a gTLD to go through its first renewal/deletion cycle.
There’s no point looking at TLDs less than a year old as they can only be growing.
This whittling process left me with 334 gTLDs.
Counting the domains in those gTLDs’ zone files, I found that:

• 96 (28.7%) were smaller June 1 than they were 30 days earlier.
• 104 (31.1%) were smaller June 1 than they were 90 days earlier.
• 76 (22.7%) were smaller June 1 than they were 366 days earlier.
• 35 (10.4%) were smaller on a monthly, quarterly and annual basis.

Zone files don’t include all registered domains, of course, but the proportion of those excluded tends to be broadly similar between gTLDs. Apples-to-apples comparisons are, I believe, fair.
And I think it’s fair to say that if a gTLD has gotten smaller over the previous month, quarter and year, that gTLD is “shrinking”.
There are the TLDs.
[table id=42 /]
Concerning those 35 shrinking gTLDs:

• The average size of the zones, as of June 1, was 17,299 domains.
• Combined, they accounted for 605,472 domains, down 34,412 on the year. That’s a small portion of the gTLD universe, which is currently over 20 million.
• The smallest was .wed, with 144 domains and annual shrinkage of 12. The largest was .网址 (Chinese for “.website”) which had 330,554 domains and annual shrinkage of 7,487.
• The mean shrinkage over the year was 983 domains per gTLD. Over the quarter it was 1,025. Over the month it was 400.

Sixteen of the 35 domains belong to Donuts, which is perhaps to be expected given that it has the largest stable and was the most aggressive early mover.
Of its first batch of seven domains to go to GA, way back in February 2014, only three — .guru, .singles, and .plumbing — are on our list of shrinkers.
A Donuts spokesperson told DI today that its overall number of registrations is on the increase and that “too much focus on individual TLDs doesn’t accurately indicate the overall health of the TLD program in general and of our portfolio specifically.”
He pointed out that Donuts has not pursued the domainer market with aggressive promotions, targeting instead small and medium businesses that are more likely to actually use their domains.
“As initial domainer investors shake out, you’re likely to see some degradation in the size of the zone,” he said.
He added that Donuts has seen second-year renewal rates of 72%, which were higher than the first year.
“That indicates that there’s more steadiness in the registration base today than there was when first-year renewals were due,” he said.