AFNIC, registry of France's ccTLD .FR, has published a report on the state of the world domain market. The document states a slowdown in the growth rate. In 2016 the growth was only 7.1% while a year ago it was 11.7%. At the end of 2016 there were 338 million registered domain names. 169 million were registered in the “old” domain zones, 141 million in ccTLDs and 28 million in new gTLDs.
Domain .COM is the undisputed leader. 131 million names were registered in this domain; its market share was 39 percent. At the same time its hegemony becomes slightly less pronounced: in a year its market share decreased by 3% and growth rate decreased from 6.4 to 3.7 percent. On the contrary, new domains had a tangible increase in their market share – it grew from 4 to 8 percent in a year. As for the ccTLDs, after excellent results of 2015 they demonstrated zero growth in 2016. While in North America and Africa the dynamics is positive, we speak of stagnation when it comes to the European domain market.
