Namecheap, one of the world’s leading domain registrars, has published some results of its work in the past year. In part, they are quite predictable: the largest number of registrations made through the company was for the generic top-level domain .COM, whose number totaled 3,661,899. However, the runner-up on the list is a surprise. For several years, this line was securely held by a new generic top-level domain .XYZ – while this year, it has settled for only third place with its 519,800 registrations. And the second was .SHOP, with 721,532 names registered by Namecheap users over the year.
Still more interesting is the situation in registrations in the national domain areas. Given the immense popularity of Anguilla’s .AI national domain over many months already, it would have been logical to suppose that it should be on top of the list. However, the latter has been topped by the national domain of Montenegro .ME, which was only in eighth place last year. Namecheap customers registered 143,244 names in .ME, while .AI was only in fourth place with 52,715 registrations, yielding not only to Montenegro’s .ME, but also Colombia’s ccTLD .CO (119,134 registrations) as well as the United States’ ccTLD .US (92,226 registrations).
Interestingly, the .DEV domain and the Canadian national domain .CA have shown the highest renewal rates through Namecheap for years. Meanwhile, the average lifetime of .COM names registered through Namecheap is 2.1 years.
