Interest in the new gTLDs seems to be on a decline, which negatively affects the statistics. Kevin Murphy, a reporter for the informed resource Domain Incite, wrote that the number of active names in the new domains for the first time in 18 months had dropped below 20 million. According to Murphy, this unfortunate achievement was recorded exactly on January 1st. New domains reached the maximum of 26 million active names in March of 2017 and since then the indicators are on the decline.
Only in the last three months new domains lost about half a million names. The main source of the “collapse” were domain zones .TOP, .XYZ and .KIWI. Domain Incite believes that one of the reasons for this sharp drop was that some new domains, primarily .XYZ, offered name registration for very low prices. This attracted new registrants; however, a lot of them later did not consider it necessary to renew registrations of their names. It should be noted that the data provided is based on the information from domain zone’s files, which include domain names associated with active DNS servers only. Therefore, the total number of names registered in the new domains might be over 20 million; the article’s focus was on the active names.
