I was looking at nTLDStats.com this morning, and I noticed what appears to be the first decline in the number of new gTLD domain name registrations. I looked through the chart since the website began tracking the number of domain registrations, and it appears that March 25 – 26, 2015 showed the first decline in registrations. (See update below)
On March 25, nTLDStats reported a total of 4,797,244 new gTLD domain names registered. On March 26, there were 4,795,908 new gTLD domain names registered. This shows a loss of 1,336 domain names. Prior to this, the number of new domain names registered had been growing fairly steadily. This is obviously not a substantial decline, but it is a bit of a surprise to me to see at this point.
I certainly don’t think there has been a peak in new domain names registered. I believe there are currently unavailable extensions that are coming that are going to be home runs for their respective registries. In the nearterm I think this is likely a short lived blip. It caught me a bit off guard to see though.
I am unsure of why there is a difference, but NameStat.org is not showing the same drop as nTLDStats. NameStat is showing a total of 4,692,600 registrations. nTLDStats covers 573 TLDs and NameStat covers 578 TLDs, although it doesn’t make sense to me that the totals are lower on NameStat when it tracks 5 more TLDs than nTLDStats. Perhaps someone with expertise in this space can opine on this and the differences.
March 28 Update: I checked nTLDStats.com this morning, and it now shows the March 26th registration number at 4,822,667, which would not have been a decline. I am unsure why the number is different today than it was yesterday.
Lots of newbies got hit with auto renewals,so these guys are lucky otherwise the numbers would be much lower.
You might be a little too soon on that. I posted about that before, a decline, then the next day the numbers updated showing otherwise.
Thanks for sharing… I will keep my eye on it.