There hasn’t been a lot of good news in the new gTLD space in the last couple of weeks. The most recent piece of news was reported by Domain Name Wire yesterday in its article about new gTLD registries asking ICANN for a “75% cost reduction” in their annual fees. In the letter DNW cited, Registries Stakeholder Group chairman Paul Diaz wrote that “[a] number of gTLD operators are struggling.” It would appear that demand for the new domain names has not materialized as greatly as registry operators had expected.
I was looking at nTLDStats.com today, and I want to share five charts that could offer a glimmer of hope for registry operators. In particular, I wanted to look at the registration trends at some of the largest corporate and SMB domain name registrars to see what was happening. I looked at the number of registrations of new gTLD domain names at MarkMonitor, GoDaddy, Network Solutions, Name.com, and Tucows since the introduction of the new extensions.
Although I was somewhat expecting to see negative growth charts, I was surprised that wasn’t the case (besides what looks like the large drop of .XYZ domain names at Network Solutions I think). I imagine many new domain name registries expected to see hockey stick growth – or at least much greater growth than we are seeing, but at least there is growth at registrars that cater towards businesses of all sizes.
Obviously, the entirety of the news about the new domain name extension is not great (to put it lightly), but at least it seems like there is some growth at these registrars.
Courtesy of nTLDStats.com, here are the charts I saw:
