Total domain name registrations around the world dropped 2.8 million in the year to 30 June, or 0.7%, to 367.3 million, according to Verisign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief. But most noticeable was the crash in new gTLD registrations – a drop of 8.8 million to 22.9 million from 31.6 million, or 27.8% year over year.
For the second quarter of 2021 though things looked much better for new generic top-level domains as the decline appears to stabilise with an increase of less than 100,000 domain name registrations, or 0.2%, compared to the first quarter of 2021. In the quarter across all top-level domains there was an increase of 3.8 million domain name registrations, or 1.0%, compared to the first quarter of 2021.
For Verisign’s .com and .net, they had a combined total of 170.6 million domain name registrations at the end of the second quarter. As of 30 June, there were 157.0 million .com domain name registrations, up from 148.7 million 12 months ago, while .net has shown a noticeable increase for the first time in a few years, up to 13.6 million domain names from 13.4 million. At the end of the first quarter of 2021 there were 154.6 million .com domain name registrations and 13.4 million .net.
Total country code top-level domain (ccTLD) domain name registrations were 157.7 million at the end of the second quarter of 2021, an increase of 1.2 million domain name registrations, or 0.8%, compared to the first quarter of 2021. ccTLDs decreased by 2.4 million domain name registrations, or 1.5%, year over year.
An archive of Verisign’s Domain Name Industry Briefs is available from: https://www.verisign.com/en_US/domain-names/dnib/domain-name-industry-brief-reports/index.xhtml