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New gTLDs Pass Another Registration Milestone With 7 Million Registrations

The number of domain names registered across the 737 new gTLDs to have been delegated passed the seven million registrations mark on 13 August according to nTLDstats.com, making it just over two months to achieve the last million domains registered. The previous million domains were registered in pretty much right on two months while it took around three months for the million before that to be registered.Registration numbers of course aren’t everything as Jeremy Ebbels, General Manager – Registry Services, at ARI Registry Services told the Goldstein Report in July. Other important indicators are usage, how well the gTLD is used, how many resolve and how many are used in the wild. There must also be sustainable revenues, trust in the namespace and ensuring the gTLD meets its mission and purpose.But registration numbers are an easy indicator. And story! Since 7 June when the six millionth domain was registered, another 87 gTLDs have been delegated and the top gTLD by numbers, .xyz, has passed the one million registrations mark to now total 1.188 million. The second biggest gTLD is .网址 (website) although 99.98 percent of its 378,600 registrations are to a Chinese government agency and third is .science, which has been seeing its numbers growing rapidly and after five months in General Availability and now has 326,700 registrations.The top ten is rounded out by .club (279,600), .top (248,900), .wang (211,800), .party (207,000), .link (155,600), .click (144,600) and .realtor (107,100).One of the changes in the top ten is that generic terms have been taking over the top ten while some of the city gTLDs that were prominent have been falling down the list, even though their numbers, in the case of .nyc (New York City) and .london, have still been rising. However numbers for .berlin have roughly halved from a high of 157,240 in min-April to 82,665 today as many of the 60,000 or so of free or cheap domains registered, and others, have not been renewed. Promotions with free or cheap domains traditionally have low renewal rates and the .berlin experience has backed this up.On registry backend providers, CentralNic has now passed Donuts to have more domains registered across its gTLDs with roughly one-eighth the number of gTLDs, with .xyz the star of their portfolio. CentralNic has 24 new gTLDs and 1.437 million registrations, but .xyz has 1.188 million of these. Others to pass 50,000 registrations are .website (103,200) and .space (61,556).Donuts on the other hand has 1.426 million domains across their 189 gTLDs with the largest being .guru (67,300), .email (50,700) and .photography (49,200). An advantage for Donuts is they have their registrations spread across a large portfolio of gTLDs they control, and 43 have more than 10,000 registrations. CentralNic on the other hand could be seen as more vulnerable. If the owner of their largest gTLD was to move to another backend registry it would have a significant impact. But for now, particularly with Google now using abc.xyz for their parent company Alphabet, they are flying high.