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These are the TLD growers and shrinkers of 2024 (part two)

Kevin Murphy, January 20, 2025, Domain Registries

Following on from the annual ccTLD growth statistics DI published last week, today we’ll look at the gTLDs, where .shop was by far the biggest volume winner and .com was by far the biggest loser.

GMO Registry’s .shop added 1,315,000 names to its zone file in 2024, ending the year with 3,470,000 domains. It’s now the second-largest of the 2012 batch of gTLDs, after .xyz.

The growth seems to have been pretty consistent across the year and is presumably due to the low first-year prices offered by many registrars. At least 10 registrars offer .shop for under a dollar currently, one as low as $0.27, though around $25 appears to be the floor for renewals.

.xyz, .lol, .bond and .sbs recorded similar growth stats, up 495,000, 487,000, 468,000 and 459,000 domains to end the year with 3,801,000, 601,000, 710,000 and 824,000 respectively.

Of the 750-odd gTLDs (excluding dot-brands) for which I have stats, only about 200 grew by more than one domain per day. About 60 grew by five-figure amounts. About 280 shrank. The rest were either still unlaunched or recorded negligible growth.

Only about 80 currently have over 50,000 names in the zones which, if the number matched domains under management, would be the threshold for triggering ICANN’s per-transaction fees.

At the other end of the table, .com was by far the biggest volume loser, down 3,769,000 zone file domains to end the period at 153,856,000. Verisign has blamed economic factors in China and price increases at American registrars for the decline. Verisign’s .net lost 424,000 names to end with 12,485,000.

ShortDot’s .cfd, a stable sister to .sbs and .bond at the top end of the table, lost over three quarters of its domains over the course of the year, ending December down 782,000 at 238,000 names, showing that domains sold for pennies tend not to stick around very long.

The next five shrinkers were .click, .space, .buzz, .live and .bio, which were down 94,000, 72,000, 43,000, 41,000 and 30,000 to end the year with 471,000, 310,000, 316,000, 545,000 and 48,000 domains respectively.

.social, .gay, .win, .mobi, .monster, .website and .biz all saw declines in the low five figures in the period.

Figures in this article are sourced from domain counts in zone files collected on January 1 2024 and 2025, rounded to the nearest thousand.

Domain industry had best April ever under lockdown

Kevin Murphy, August 10, 2020, Domain Registries

The domain industry had its best April ever in terms of new domains sold in gTLDs, according to my tally, despite much of the Western world spending the month in coronavirus lockdown.

There were a total of 5,291,077 domain adds in April, across all 1,253 gTLDs currently filing transaction reports with ICANN.

That’s up almost 100,000 on the 5,191,880 adds in April 2019 and the best April since the first new gTLDs started coming into circulation in 2013.

[table id=60 /]

While a measly 100k jump may be less impressive than expected based on the enthusiastic descriptions of the lockdown bump coming from registries and registrars over the last few months, it makes a bit more sense when you factor out Chinese volume success story .icu.

.icu, currently the largest of the new gTLDs, was having a bit of a growth spurt at the start of 2019, and added 267,287 domains in April last year. That was down to 56,714 this April. The TLD has been declining for the last few months.

Looking at the TLDs that seem most obviously related to lockdown, the standout is .bar, which added 26,175 names this April, compared to just 151 a year ago.

It’s been well-reported that many restaurants and bars affected by coronavirus switched to online ordering and home delivery, and .bar appears to be a strong beneficiary of this trend.

.bar currently has more than 100,000 names in its zone file, roughly double its pre-lockdown level.

.com fared well, adding 3,382,029 domains this April, compared to 3,360,238 in the year-ago period.

But .xyz did better, relatively, adding 256,271 names, compared to 200,003 a year earlier.

Also noteworthy was .buzz, which has been performing very strongly over the last 12 months. It added 60,808 names this April, compared to just a few hundred.

This table shows the 20 gTLDs with the most adds in April 2020, with their April 2019 numbers for comparison.

[table id=61 /]