CNNIC, the registry that manages China’s ccTLD .CN, has published domain stats for the end of 2024. The number of registrations in the Chinese ccTLD amounted to 20,823,037, which is 1,261,030 registered domains more than at the end of June and 721,546 more than at the end of 2023.
Domain Incite, writing about these stats, notes that CNNIC publishes its stats twice a year, and it’s not rare for the domain zone to fluctuate by millions of domains. The most striking example is the difference between June 2020 and 2021. In the summer of 2020, CNNIC estimated the number of registrations in its domain zone at 23 million, and a year later only 15 million. Therefore, an increase of 1.2 million names in six months is not something extraordinary for the Chinese ccTLD.
However, it refutes the idea of a sharp cooling of the Chinese domain market. This is the factor that the Verisign management calls one of the main reasons behind the .COM shrink each quarter. According to CNNIC’s states, Chinese individuals and companies continue to rather actively register new domains, and not in their ccTLD only. For example, the number of domains registered in new generic top-level domains has grown from 2,066,573 to 3,640,877 over the past year – that is, by more than one and a half million.
The number of domains in .COM registered in China has really dropped throughout the year, by almost 900,000: from 7,925,489 to 7,047,974. Perhaps at least these stats will give Verisign the idea that the main reason for the decline in popularity of .COM is not some outside influences, but the fact that the company itself increases prices in the domain zone from year to year.
