A large domain registrar Namecheap summed up the results of the first half of the year. These statistics may be of interest both for domain investors and for those who are just looking at the domain business. If we talk about leadership in terms of the number of new registrations, then, of course, we should not expect any sensations: 39.5% of all names registered in the first six months of the year through Namecheap fall on the .COM domain zone. Also, the top five most popular domains among the company's clients included .XYZ, .SHOP, .CLICK and .ONLINE.
But the registration renewal statistics are quite curious. Namecheap has tracked the renewals of recently registered domain names starting January 1, 2021. It is the first renewals that reveal much about the success and prospects of generic top-level domains. So, the leader in this indicator was the new .DEV domain, which demonstrated a renewal rate of 59%. And in the .COM, this figure was only 31%. Domain Name Wire, reporting this piece of news, notes that the company Verisign, which manages the .COM, constantly estimates the renewal rate of registrations in it at 73-74%. However, these data also take into account domain names that have been registered for a long time and are renewed from year to year. If we talk about new registrations, then the picture, apparently, does not look so rosy.
The Namecheap report also draws attention to the success of Anguilla's ccTLD .AI. In the wake of the popularity of artificial intelligence, in the first half of the year it entered the top four most demanded national domain zones, leaving behind only the national domains of Colombia (.CO), USA (.US) and Great Britain (.CO.UK).
