Verisign has published its Domain Name Industry Brief (DNIB) for the Q3 2022. It states that as of September 30, the total number of registered domain names in all domain zones amounted to 349.9 million. This is 11.5 million names more than in Q3 2021, but 1.6 million less than in Q2 this year. Thus, in 2022, the total number of domains has been declining for three consecutive quarters.
China's ccTLD .CN led the way with registrations dropping from 20.6 million in Q2 to 18 million in Q3. Such a drop could not but affect the general state of affairs in country code domains: the number of registrations in them decreased by a total of 1.7 million. However, compared to the same period last year, national domain zones were able to show an increase of 5.7 million domains, ending the quarter with 132.4 million registrations. Australia's ccTLD .AU achieved the greatest success, adding 400,000 new domain names and reaching the mark of 4 million registrations. This allowed the Australian ccTLD to bypass the ccTLD of France .FR and the combined ccTLD of the countries of the European Union .EU and take the seventh line in the list of the largest country code domains. The success is directly related to the fact that this year the registration of second-level domain names was finally allowed in the national domain of Australia this year, notes the Domain Incite reporting this news.
Another loss was suffered by the largest domain zone .COM, managed by Verisign itself. Here the number of registrations decreased by 200,000 and amounted to 160.9 million by the end of Q3. Among the possible reasons, experts cite the general instability of the global economy, the cooling of the domain market after a sharp overheating during the pandemic, and the increase in prices in the .COM domain, which took effect in September.
Best of all, the difficult situation for the domain market is tolerated by new gTLDs. They ended the quarter with 27.3 million registered names, up both from the previous quarter (by 300,000 registrations) and from the same period last year (by 3.8 million names).
