Verisign has published its regular quarterly report, Domain Name Industry Brief, that serves as the main source of information on the state of affairs in the domain industry. The report summarizes the results of Q4 and the year as a whole. According to the document, gTLD .COM, managed by Verisign, finished the year with 139 million registered names after growing by 7.1 million names. By comparison, the total growth of all new gTLDs over the previous year amounted to 3.2 million names. Thus, every new registered name across all new domains accounted for two (or slightly more) names in .COM.
However, the indicators for the new domain areas are still growing little by little. New domains finished 2018 with 23.8 million registered names and their total market share is 6.8% against 6.2% in 2017. At the same time, national domains managed to outsell .COM, growing by a total of 8.2 million to reach 154.3 million. Although these indicators also include the data on Tokelau’s .TK which is only formally national. The domains in this area are registered for free and without a time limit and they are extensively used by registrants with unlawful intentions. It is estimated that .TK has around 21.5 million registered names.
