Verisign has released its Domain Name Industry Brief (DNIB) for the second quarter of 2021. As usual, business is booming in the .COM and .NET zones it manages. The TLDs had a combined total of 170.6 million domain name registrations as of June 30. The growth compared to the first quarter amounted to 1.5 percent or 2.6 million registrations.
The total number of domains registered in the world, now 367.3 million, has grown by 3.8 million or one percent compared to the first quarter. However, this is 2.8 million fewer than in the second quarter of last year. Tokelau’s “conditional” ccTLD .TK can be considered among the responsible. Its numbers have plummeted, so, as a result, the ccTLDs added 1.2 million registrations compared to the first quarter but dropped 2.4 million against last year. At the same time, if we exclude .TK’s numbers from the ccTLD statistics (which seems quite logical), then the ccTLDs showed slight growth of 0.3 percent on last year.
However, new gTLDs are the main reason for the lower number of registrations compared to last year. According to Verisign, over the year they have lost 22.9 million domains, or 27.8 percent. This can be explained by the fact that overgenerous sunrise periods and renewal rates in many new domain zones have ended.
