The Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries, CENTR, has published its CENTRstats Global TLD Report for the first quarter of this year. The document describes the status in all generic top-level domains, focusing on the national domains of European countries. According to the report, the total number of recorded domains had reached an estimated 333 million by the end of April of this year, 1.4% year-on-year. At the same time, about 56% of domain names globally are gTLDs and 44% are ccTLDs. This proportion has not changed substantially over the past few years, and the introduction of new gTLDs has not had any noticeable influence on it.
Combined gTLDs grew marginally in the first quarter: compared to the same period in 2017, it was only 0.1%. Of the legacy gTLDs, .info and.com are the ones to have maintained consistent positive growth over the past year, by 18% and 4.1%, respectively. At the same time, other larger legacy gTLDs such as .net, .org and .biz have all declined in total domains. The European TLD market is estimated at 100 million domains, of which 59% are European-based ccTLDs. These domains showed an increase of 3.6%. The median retail price of registering a new name in the national European domain zones is approximately 10 euros.
Speaking of new domains, the report identifies so-called "geographic" domain names as a separate group. Median growth among geographic gTLDs was 1.9% year-on-year. However, it is noteworthy that this group had some of the lowest rates of domain parking among all new gTLDs. This suggests that geographic domains are not registered "for future use" or "just in case", but primarily for the purpose of building operational websites.
