Verisign has published the Domain Name Industry Brief for Q1 2019 on its website. The report says that gTLD .COM, managed by Verisign, added about 2 million registrations in the first three months of this year. Compared with Q1 2018, the increase was 7.1 million names. The total number of registered names in the domain has reached 141 million.
New gTLDs showed reduced results. Compared to Q4 2018, the total number of names registered in new gTLDs decreased by about 800,000 to 23 million. However, a comparison with Q1 2018 still shows a growth of 2.8 million registrations. At the same time, Domain Incite, commenting on the report data, notes that the results of the new domains could have turned out to be significantly worse. Last August, the Famous Four Media registry, managing 16 new gTLDs, ceased to exist. Global Registry Services Ltd (GRS) has taken over the rights to manage these domains. The situation had a negative impact on the performance of domain zones: over the past few months, the domains managed by GRS have lost about 3 million registrations.
The growth leaders were again country-code TLDs, although many European registries complain of a decline in activity. The Domain Name Industry Brief shows that the national domain zones had a cumulative increase of 2.5 million registrations compared with December 2018 and 10 million compared with Q1 2018. The total number of registered names in national domains reached 156.8 million. However, these figures also include the “pseudo-national” domain .TK, where names are registered for free and are not deleted even after registration is not renewed.
