Global Domain Name Growth Continues at a Crawl in Second Quarter

It was only a few years ago that the growth in the number of domain names registered around the world was in the 5 to 10% range every year, sometimes even higher. Today however that growth has slowed to a crawl as many markets around the world reach maturity, even saturation.

In the 12 months to the end of June domain name registrations grew by 6.7 million, or 2.1%, year over year, to a total of 331.9 million domain names across all top level domains according to the latest Domain Name Industry Brief from Verisign. For the second quarter of 2017, registrations grew approximately 1.3 million equating to a growth rate of 0.4% over the first quarter.

The .com and .net top level domains had a combined total of approximately 144.3 million domain name registrations as of the end of June. This represents a 0.8% increase year-on-year. There were 129.2 million .com registrations and 15.1 million .net registrations.

New .com and .net domain name registrations totalled 9.2 million during the second quarter of 2017. In the second quarter of 2016, new .com and .net domain name registrations totalled 8.6 million.

Compared to previous years, the global year-on-year growth across all TLDs for the 12 months to 30 June in 2009 was 9%, to 30 June 2012 it was 11.9%, 5.9% to 30 June 2015 and 12.9% to 30 June 2016.

The top 10 TLDs as of the end of June for selected years with total registrations where published in Verisign’s DNIB were:

Total ccTLD registrations were approximately 144.2 million in the second quarter of 2017, with an increase of 1.1 million, or a 0.8% increase compared to the first quarter of 2017. ccTLDs increased by approximately 3.7 million registrations, or 2.6%, year over year. Without including .tk who gives away its domain names for free, ccTLD domain name registrations increased approximately 603,000 in the second quarter of 2017, a 0.5% increase compared to the first quarter of 2017 and ccTLDs increased by approximately 3.8 million registrations, or 3.1%, year over year.

As of 30 June there were 302 global ccTLD extensions delegated in the root, including Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs), with the top 10 ccTLDs composing 64.8% of all ccTLD registrations.

Registrations among the new generic top level domains totalled 24.3 million, which represents 7.3% of total domain name registrations. The top 10 new gTLDs represented 61.5% of all new gTLD registrations.