New gTLDs grew 32 percent in a year, but their estimated renewal rate is below 30 percent
in plain words
Many new website endings, such as .top and .shop, added lots of domain names in the past year. Most of those names were not renewed once their first period ended, based on an estimate. The renewal rate is the share of owners who keep paying to keep a name.
Full summary
Verisign The company that operates the .com and .net registries. Full definition of Verisign's DNIB Domain Name Industry Brief A quarterly Verisign-sponsored report on the number of domains worldwide. Full definition of DNIB, published October 22, counted 411.6 million registered domains worldwide at the end of September. That is 9.9 million more than at the end of June and 33 million, or 8.7 percent, more than a year earlier. The report draws on data from ZookNIC and Verisign, plus zone file The set of all DNS records for a domain or TLD. Full definition of zone file that ICANN Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers The nonprofit that coordinates the global DNS and gTLD policy. Full definition of ICANN provides through its CZDS Centralized Zone Data Service ICANN's portal for requesting access to gTLD zone files. Full definition of CZDS.
new gTLD A generic top-level domain added to the internet through ICANN's New gTLD Program. Full definition of new gTLD reached 56.6 million domains at the end of September, 6.9 percent more than the previous quarter and 13.7 million more than a year before. Their growth accounted for just over 40 percent of total annual growth, and they hold 13.7 percent of all domains. The ten largest gTLD generic top-level domain A top-level domain not tied to a country, run under ICANN contracts. Full definition of gTLD include .xyz, .top, .shop, .online, .store and .vip.
The report estimates the renewal rate The percentage of expiring domains that are renewed. Full definition of renewal rate for new gTLDs at 28.6 percent. For .com and .net the preliminary figure is 74.3 percent, and older gTLDs such as .org and .info reach 79.8 percent. Among the ten largest gTLDs, .top has the lowest rate, at 12.5 percent. The report gives no reasons for the growth.
Apart from .com and .net, the rates rest on final figures from the previous quarter or on the latest available data. For most extensions they are derived from changes in zone files, assuming that all domains expire once a year.
A study by Interisle Consulting Group, cited in the report, attributes 43 percent of domains reported for attacks to new gTLDs. Interisle counted 3.6 million reported domains under .top, and more under .com.
.com and .net together reached 182.5 million domains, 6.1 percent more than a year earlier, with 169.8 million under .com. They recorded 13.1 million new registrations Domains newly created in a period, also called adds or creates. Full definition of new registrations in the quarter, compared with 10.6 million in the same quarter a year before.
Country-code domains totaled 151.4 million, up 4.6 percent. .de is the second-largest country-code extension after .cn and the third-largest overall, behind .com and .cn. The report gives no exact figure for .de. The ten largest country-code extensions hold 56.7 percent of domains, and where data exists, their renewal rates run from 70.2 percent for .ru to 82.2 percent for .fr.