Domain Incite continues its series of articles on the results of the previous year. The first part was dedicated to country-code domains, and now Kevin Murphy, who writes for the website, discusses generic top-level domains (gTLDs). Following 2024 results, the new gTLD .SHOP was the top grower: it added 1,315,000 registrations and ended the year with 3,470,000 registered names. The domain started growing rapidly during the pandemic, when small and medium-sized businesses began to transfer their activities to the online space en masse due to quarantine restrictions. The current booming rates are most likely explained by the extremely low cost of registration: at least 10 registrar companies have it less than $1. However, it will cost about $25 to renew the registration, so the stability of the current success is questionable.
Another four new domains – .XYZ, .LOL, .BOND и .SBS – have shown quite impressive growth. They added 495,000, 487,000, 468,000 and 459,000 registrations and ended the year with 3,801,000, 601,000, 710,000 and 824,000 registered names, respectively. According to the stats Domain Incite has, of the 750-odd gTLDs, about 200 grew by more than one domain per day. Another 270 or so domain zones maintained their positions or showed very slight growth. The remaining 280-odd domains shrank.
The top shrinker was the .COM gTLD, the industry’s flagman. It closed the year with 153,856,000 registered names, having lost 3,769,000 registrations. Verisign, the domain’s registry, explains this depressing result by cooling of the Chinese domain market and high prices set by American registrar companies. However, industry experts believe that Verisign’s annual increase in prices is one of the main reasons.
Another new gTLD, .CFD, lost 782,000, or over three quarters of its registrations. At the end of December, it had 238,000 registrations. It is noteworthy that a year before the cost of registration in the domain zone was extremely low, which caused rapid growth, but, as expected, it turned out to be short-lived. It will be interesting to see whether the .SHOP domain will repeat this trajectory.
And finally, the third top shrinker was another domain managed by Verisign, .NET. It lost 424,000 registrations and ended the year with 12,485,000 registered names.
