The Verisign Company published its Domain Name Industry Brief for the first quarter of 2020. It reports that 366.8 million domain names were registered in the world as of March 31. Their growth against the last year’s first quarter made up 4.2 percent or 14.9 million names in absolute figures.
Noteworthy, the new gTLD .ICU accounts for over one third of the entire increment. It added 1.6 million new registrations over a quarter. The result is equally impressive and inexplicable. Commenting on the situation, Domain Incite called the rapid growth of the .ICU popularity just another “faddy Chinese phenomena” (an overwhelming majority of registrations in the domain zone are Chinese). However, a possible explanation for the success can be the price of a domain name annual registration in .ICU, which is currently a mere $0.7. Anyway, .ICU turbulent growth let the domain zone reach the eighth line in the largest top 10 gTLDs.
Unlike .ICU, other new domains look fairly modest: .TOP added about 300,000 new registrations, .XYZ grew by about 200,000. It was predictable that .COM administered by Verisign remained the leader: the number of the names registered there increased by 1.9 million to reach 147.3 million over the first quarter. Another Verisign controlled domain – .NET – has shown practically zero progress; the number of its newly registered names amounted to 13.4 million by the end of the quarter.
National domains continue to face a recession: their number of registrations went down by 200,000 in the first quarter of 2020 compared to last year’s fourth quarter and stopped at 157.4 million. Nevertheless, it still means that national domains have grown by 600,000 registrations against the first quarter of 2019.
