According to Verisign’s Domain Name Industry Brief there are 184 million domains registered.

Although, this is an incredible number it still shows a sobering year-over-year decline of 15% in the same quarter last year. Verisign suggested the decline is season and economy related. This does make some sense since the summer is typically a slower time for domain registrations. I experienced this over the 3 years I was at GoDaddy.

The largest TLDs in terms of base size were .com, .cn, .de, .net, .org, .uk, .info, .nl (Netherlands), .eu (European Union), and .biz.

Total Domain Name Registrations

At the end of the 2nd quarter of 2009 there were 74.4 million ccTLD registrations in total. It is also interesting to note that of the available 240 ccTLDs the top 10 make up 66 percent of the ccTLD market. Some interesting highlights included the .ar (Argentine) domain name which experienced 8% growth and the .br (Brazil) and .ru (Russia) which increased by 7%. The .cn (China) experienced an 8% drop after seeing strong growing the past few quarters.

Top 10 ccTLD Domain Names as of the 2nd quarter of 2009

1. .cn (China)
2. .de (Germany)
3. .uk (United Kingdom)
4. .nl (Netherlands)
5. .eu (European Union)
7. .ar (Argentina)
8. .br (Brazil)
9. .it (Italy)
10. .us (United States)

The bulk of domain registrations still .com and .net

The second quarter of 2009 ended with 93.5 million domains registered. This represents only a 7% increase from the same quarter last year. The renewal rate for .com and .net domains also had a slight decrease to 70% from 71%. Verisign also estimates that 89% of the registered domains resolved to a “site.” That said it counts parked pages and one-page web sites in that percentage. This definitely skews the statistic a bit as most registrars by default will put up a parked page if no DNS is set. Additionally, many large domain holders utilize parking while waiting for a sale or development.

Conclusions

I find the reported results to be a mix of good and bad. It does show declines in some areas, such as overall registration; however, it also shows increases in other areas such as ccTLDs. The staggering 93.5 million registered .com and .net, which is mostly .com and leads me to maintain my confidence in the .com. It’s certainly going to be the dominant extension for years to come regardless of what new TLDs are offered. As a result I would be wary of new extensions and would only buy them with speculation in mind and would not recommend an entire portfolio of other gTLD or ccTLDs.

One interesting statistic is that the .us extension still lags so much behind other ccTLDs. It would only seem to make sense that their would be a huge increase in use of the .us extension, but for the most part it is still few and far between. The .us offers a great alternative to the .com for US based businesses. We’ll have to wait and see if advertisers start to use it in their marketing efforts. This may indicate a buy signal as it is truly a logical direction for the market and should at some point gain some momentum. Once caveat is that the registry in an effort to expand the extension has been allowing registrars to run some pretty crazy promotions, such as $2.99 .us domains offered by GoDaddy. This price bastardizing could lead to a .info phenoma and dilute the extensions value.

Tags: Domains, verisign

This entry was posted on Monday, September 21st, 2009 at 9:05 pm and is filed under Domain News, Domaining. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.