As economies around the world hit headwinds with rising prices, worker shortages and interest rate rises, it seems domain name registration growth has stagnated. During the second quarter of 2022, the total number of domain names registered across all top-level domains increased by 1.0 million, or 0.3%, in the second quarter of 2022 according to Verisign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief released this week. In the 12 months to 30 June, domain name registrations increased by 10.4 million, or 3.0%. This took the total to 351.5 million domain name registrations.
The second quarter also saw a very rare occurrence – the total number of .com domain names actually dropped by around 200,000. As of 30 June, there were 161.1 million domain name registrations, down from 161.3 million on 31 March while for .net there were 13.2 million registrations, down from 13.4 million 3 months earlier.
New .com and .net domain name registrations totalled 10.1 million at the end of the second quarter of 2022, compared to 11.7 million domain name registrations at the end of the second quarter of 2021.
For country code top-level domains (ccTLDs), growth was slightly above that of all TLDs for the quarter, but lower for the year to 30 June. ccTLD registrations totalled 134.1 million at the end of the second quarter, an increase of 0.7 million, or 0.5%, compared to the first quarter of 2022. ccTLDs increased by 2.6 million domain name registrations, or 2.0%, year-over-year.
For new generic top-level domains (new gTLDs) there was significant growth compared for the 12 months to 30 June, up a total of 4.1 million, or 18.1%, year over year, taking the total to 27.0 million. This followed a crash in new gTLD registrations that went from October 2020 to July 2021 where around 10 million registrations were lost according to nTLDstats. For the second quarter of 2022 there was an increase of 0.7 million domain name registrations, or 2.6%.
When it comes to the top 10 TLDs, the order remained the same, as it did for ccTLDs, with very little variation in the total number of domain name registrations – just a 100,000 or so up or down if there was any movement at all. The only two TLDs that showed any notable movement was the abovementioned .net which declined by around 200,000 and .xyz, which increased by around 200,000. Due to rounding these differences could range from anything from just over 100,000 to just under 300,000.