Verisign has released its traditional Domain Name Industry Brief (DNIB) for Q4 2021. It states that as of the end of last year, 341.7 million domain names were registered all over the world. Considering that a year earlier this number was 364.6 million, it seems like it is just right to sound the alarm and scream about a catastrophic fall. However, there is no cause for concern. The fact is that Verisign decided to change the methodology for preparing the report.
The change comes down to the fact that indicators of domains managed by the Dutch registry Freenom are excluded from the statistics, according to the Domain Name Wire resource. It includes the ccTLDs of the Central African Republic .CF, Gabon .GA, Equatorial Guinea .GQ and Mali .ML. But Freenom's main asset is, of course, the ccTLD of tiny island territory of Tokelau, .TK. The company's policy provides for free registration of names, and domains are not deleted after the expiration of the registration period. All this led to the fact that for many years .TK was formally the largest national domain in the world.
Market analysts have repeatedly complained that the .TK data distorts the real picture and makes it difficult to get an objective picture of the state of affairs in the domain industry. It looks like it will be easier to do it now. Verisign said in a statement that the results for the .TK, .CF, .GA, .GQ, and .ML domain zones are excluded from the review due to major changes in the registration number estimate not explained by the registry and the lack of objective supporting information. This has led to such a significant “fall” in the number of domain names registered in the world. By the way, if we remove the indicators of the domain zones listed above from the data of the same DNIB for the Q3 of 2021, it turns out that during the Q4, the number of registrations not only did not decrease, but also increased - by about 1%.
