The Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries (CENTR) has recently published its CENTRstats Global TLD Report covering the first quarter of 2019. CENTR brings together European national domain registries, and its reports are traditionally considered one of the most respected sources of information on the domain space. The report presents a grim situation: the domain growth rates are not just slowing down, but are now hitting record lows. In the first quarter of 2019, the median domain growth stood at 3.4 percent per year, the lowest yet. To put this into perspective, the record high is 29.8 percent; it was recorded in the third quarter of 2015 as a result of increasing interest for new gTLDs.
CENTR experts obtained the median domain growth rates upon analyzing the rates of a total of 500 top TLDs. In the group of top 300 domains, this rate was slightly higher – 4.1 percent. All in all, the experts analyzed a total of 1,486 TLDs out of 1,531 that are currently in the root. The report did not include TLDs that were too small or had unreliable data.
It is worth noting that both TLDs and ccTLDs are going through equally hard times with similar growth rates. However, gTLDs seem to be doing a bit better. Speaking of ccTLDs, their rates are the lowest in saturated markets, with 1.4 percent growth in the American market and 6.3 percent growth in the African market, which remains relatively low. CENTR also states that by the end of the first quarter of 2019, a total of 351 million domains were registered worldwide.
