The AFNIC non-profit organization, which is the registry for the French ccTLD .FR, has released The Global Domain Name Market in 2021. The 84-page report includes the main trends of the domain market in 2021. Its flagship is .COM, whose leadership is undeniable. From year to year, the domain indicators are growing steadily. At the end of 2021, about 164 million names were registered in the domain zone, and its market share increased to 47% compared to 44% a year earlier. However, the indicators of the second half of the year were not so successful, which analysts attribute to price increases in the domain zone since September 1, 2021.
In other legacy gTLDs, the situation is quite contradictory. Thus, .BIZ and .ORG showed a slight increase (3% and 2%, respectively) compared to the previous year. At the same time, .INFO and .MOBI saw a significant decline, by 8% and 15%, respectively. In general, the number of domain names in legacy domain zones (except .COM) remained almost unchanged – about 32 million, but the market share decreased from 10% to 9%.
ccTLDs in most regions show stable results. Their annual growth was about 6% in North America and about 3% in Europe. Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as Africa performed well, with an 18% and 15% growth, respectively. However, a strong (about 14%) decline in the ccTLDs of China .CN and Taiwan .TW led to a decrease in the overall market share of the ccTLDs (36% vs. 37%) and the number of names registered in them (125 million against 130 a year earlier). The most prosperous region in this sense is Europe: out of 31 ccTLDs, in which 1 million or more names are registered, 18 fall on the European continent.
The decline continues in new generic top-level domains. The number of names registered in them decreased to 29 million, while in 2020 this figure was 32 million. Their market share also decreased from 9% to 8%. At the same time, the report notes the continuing consolidation in this market segment. As of the end of 2021, the three largest players – Ethos Capital (Afilias + Donuts), CentralNic and GoDaddy – collectively managed 60% of all new domain zones. And if we talk about domain names registered in new domain zones, then the share of these three players looks even more significant – 72%.
