Verisign has released its Domain Name Industry Brief (DNIB) for the third quarter of 2019. According to the report, 359.8 million domain names were registered all over the world by the end of September, or 5.1 million names more than in the previous quarter. However, Domain Incite writes that in fact there is not much reason for excitement. The peak growth of 2.6 million registrations came from Tokelau’s .TK, where the managing company, Freenom, hands out domain names for free and never deletes them, so the quality of this growth looks doubtful.
A new gTLD, .ICU, was another big grower, and did well on the Chinese market. There were over one million registrations there between July and September. However, the telling moment will come when it’s time to renew the registration. Domain names in .ICU are very cheap: the fee during constant sales and promotions is usually $1-2. Most of the names registered there are not used and not renewed.
Therefore, the only real grower is Verisign’s own .COM, which gained 1.5 million names and reached 144 million during the third quarter. The total number of registrations stands at 5.1 million names, which means all the other gTLDs (over 1,500) were not able to show a significant increase over the third quarter.
