Non-profit organization Afnic, which is the registry of France's ccTLD .FR, has published its annual report. It demonstrates a small but stable growth of the number of registrations in the domain. In 2016 627 thousand new names were registered, an increase of 2.2% compared to 2015. This indicator is also greater than average growth rates in ccTLDs of 28 EU member states. The share of the domain market that belongs to .FR in France remains stable for the last 5 years and amounts to 35%.
At the same time the report states the decrease the growth rate in the French gTLD that has been going on for several years. One of its main reasons is that from year to year the growing number of registrants doesn’t renew registrations of their domain names. As a way to overcome this trend domain .FR from March 2015 introduced the possibility to register domain names for up to 10 years. At the moment registrants of 220 thousand domains in .FR, which is 7.3% of the total number of registrations, used this option.
