Council of European National Top Level Domain Registries CENTR has published the DomainWire Global TLD Report for the third quarter of the year. The report shows that the growth of the domain space from July until September almost stopped. It was a growth of 0.7% compared to the same period last year. Out of 17 “old” generic top-level domains only five domain zones showed any growth. Domain .COM is obviously a leader; it had almost 2 million new registrations in the third quarter.
European ccTLDs in general didn’t show any growth; however, after a steady decline over a long period of time this result is described in the report as a positive one. Domains .SE (Sweden), .PT (Portugal) and .AL (Albania) were the leaders in terms of growth among European ccTLDs.
The situation with the new gTLDs is the worst; they experienced a 7.2% decline. The main “culprits” are domain zones that practiced almost free distribution of names. When the renewal period came many registrants who purchased the names cheaply “just in case” simply didn’t renew them. Primarily this is true for .XYZ and .TOP. The report reads that if they are not taken into the account, the domain space growth is 2.5% instead of 0.7%. Another reason for slowdown is the decline of activity on the Chinese market. In addition, the domain states that some new domains demonstrated good growth rates over the last year and an internationalized domain .РУС is one of them. The total number of domain names registered in the world by the end of September 2017 is around 311 million.
