Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries CENTR has published a report on the state of global domain name system in the IV quarter of 2016. According to this document, as of the end of the year, there were 309.4 million registered domain names in all gTLDs. The net increase in the IV quarter was relatively small – around 1.03 million (0.3%).
Experts explain that the IV quarter of 2016 was the first renewal period for the “Chinese domain boom” of the end of 2015. Registration of a significant number of domains was not renewed, which led to lower rated in the largest domain zones including .COM and .NET. By the end of IV quarter they showed a decrease – 1.2% and 2.9% respectively. In general, this has led to a slight decrease in the share of the domain market occupied by the “old” gTLDs. Therefore, the share of new gTLDs has slightly increased (by 0.8%).
Country-code generic top-level domains retain their stable market share of about 40%. In the IV quarter of 2016 they grew by 1.4%. When it comes to the TOP 10, as many as 7 of them demonstrated decline in the number of registrations. In comparison, Russian ccTLD .RU is worth mentioning, because in the IV quarter it demonstrated 1.6% growth, which allowed .RU to rise to the 9th position in the rating, leaving .INFO behind.
