June 3, 2020
How did the first quarter of this year shape up for domain name registrations globally? A new report from Verisign shows continued growth overall.
Verisign's Domain Name Industry Brief states the first quarter of 2020 closed with 366.8 million domain name registrations across all top-level domains (TLDs), an increase of 14.9 million, or 4.2 percent, year over year.
The .com domain name base totaled 147.3 million registrations at the end of the quarter, so 40% of all domain names registered.
As for country code Top Level Domains, registrations increased by 0.6 million or 0.4 percent year over year to reach 157.4 million. Verisign puts the top 10 ccTLDs, as at March 31, 2020 as:
While .au didn't make the top 10 again, by the end of March the AU registry had a very healthy 3,169,412 au domain names under management. The only countries in the ccTLD top ten with higher registrations per capita than Australia (1 domain name per 8 residents) are the Netherlands (1 domain per 3 residents), Germany (1 domain per 5 residents) and the UK (1 domain per 6 residents).
But what about Tokelau - the tiny South Pacific territory where the population is just 1,411 and yet boasts 25.1 million domain names? Some would argue it doesn't really count as a "true" ccTLD as the .tk extension is open to everyone, everywhere these days and furthermore, registration is free. Another fascinating fact about the .tk namespace is revenue is generated by selling traffic to "expired" domain names to advertising networks; i.e the names never really expire as they do in other registries.
As for new gTLDs (ngTLDs), registrations reached 32.3 million at the end of the first quarter of 2020, an increase of 9.3 million or 40.7 percent year over year. There are now more than 1,500 ngTLD's but just three (.icu, .top and .xyz) make up 39.2% of all ngTLD registrations.
The full Verisign Domain Name Industry Brief covering Q1 2020 can be viewed here.
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