A statistics report came out on the activity of domain registrars for June 2018. Domain Incite has found a curious fact. The Chinese registrar Alibaba became both the fastest-growing and the fastest-shrinking registrar. Its Singaporean branch, Alibaba.com Singapore E-commerce Private Ltd., ranked first in terms of new registrations: the number of its domain names increased by 720,669.
At the same time, the Beijing affiliate of the same company, Alibaba Cloud Computing Ltd, showed the worst results, with the number of domain names declining by 266,411. The answer is simple. Alibaba has actively worked with the .LOAN domain, which held numerous promotion campaigns in the spring and summer offering cheap registrations. According to SpamHaus, .LOAN is a champion in junk mail distribution: over 90 percent of its domain names are associated with spamming. Of course, spammers never plan to use a domain name for long: they either abandon them after the promo campaign or these domains get blocked for illegal activity. These domains in .LOAN account for the growth of Alibaba’s Singapore branch and the decrease of the Beijing branch. In addition, the GRS Domains registry, which replaced Famous Four Media as the administrator of .LOAN, has stopped offering large discounts since August 20. Therefore, Alibaba’s Singapore branch will most likely see a reduced number of registrations in the fall.
