Q1 domain name round-up

The Brief reveals that there were 363.5 million domain name registrations across all Top Level Domains at the end of March, which is down by 2.8 million names when compared with the end of 2020. 

Europe and China

The decrease highlighted in the Brief seems, at first glance, to buck the trend observed in a number of ccTLDs, such as Germany, the Czech Republic, Greece and The Netherlands, which experienced increases as high as 20% over the past year, as was reported by Belgium in its 2020 Annual Report. 

However, it appears that the dip is partially attributable to a decrease in  Chinese domain name registrations, which were down four million to 20.7 million for the quarter, along with decreases in certain other gTLDs also popular with Chinese registrants, such as .ICU, .WANG and .TOP.  The .ICU TLD alone lost over 2.6 million domain names in the first quarter of 2021.

gTLD totals

The total number of new gTLDs was down 12.3 percent in the first quarter of 2021, with a 29.3 percent drop recorded in 2020. This decrease could be explained by the expiry of the first-year discounted registration prices offered by a number of registrars and Registries and designed to attract customers to these new gTLDs.

Positive trends

However, it is not all gloom as the Brief once again reported strong growth for the .COM TLD, which was up from 151.8 million reported in the Q4 Brief to 154.6 million.  Additionally, the number of new .COM and .NET domain name registrations totalled 11.6 million at the end of the first quarter. 

The Brief notes that, as of 31 March 2021, the largest TLDs by number of reported domain names were .COM, .TK (Tokelau), .CN (China), .DE (Germany), .NET, .UK (United Kingdom), .ORG, .NL (the Netherlands), .RU (Russia) and .BR (Brazil).

Authored by the Anchovy News team