The Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries (CENTR), which unites ccTLD registries from 34 countries, has published its Q3/2021 report. It estimates the number of domain names registered in countries whose national registries are members of CENTR at 116 million as of October 1. Of these, 69 million are ccTLDs and 35 million are .COM names. Growth in comparison with the same period of last year is 3% in both cases. Another 12 million names are registered in other domain zones, with slightly higher growth (4%).
The median growth of European ccTLDs in the third quarter was 3.7% compared to last year. The number of new registrations turned out to be higher than in the second quarter, but still lower than the corresponding period of 2020. At the same time, renewals once again increased and reached a very high rate of 85.4%.
The median retail price of domain names in European ccTLDs at registrar companies did not change much throughout 2021, with annual registration costing about 10 euros by late September. This fee is lower than the price of registration in .COM, which is about 12 euros. As for the use of domain names, about 28% of the names registered in European ccTLDs do not respond to DNS queries, and another 27% are parked. These figures also remained stable throughout 2021 and now look slightly better than the averages of the top 100 generic top-level domains (45% and 32%, respectively).
Describing the developments in the global domain market, the report highlights that new generic top-level domains have not yet been able to break through as serious players in this market. And the pace of diversification, which was expected to take off with the advent of new domain zones, has declined. At the beginning of 2018, the share of names registered in .COM was about 70% of the total number of names in all gTLDs (excluding ccTLDs), while by mid-2021, it increased to 74%.
