With all of the buzz surrounding the new top level domain names that are being released it’s interesting to take a look at what effect these have had on the volume of registrations for the standard TLD’s. HosterStats.com publishes reports on this data and the monthly growth figures for .COM show that the TLD’s growth is in fact slowing down. However the number of new registrations each month in .COM is still more than the entire number of new gTLD domain names registered to date.
Looking at some of the other main TLDs we can see that they are not doing as well as .COM and some of them are losing domain name sales. The .INFO, .MOBI and .ASIA are continuing to lose domains and the renewals for the .BIZ promotion last year are approaching. The .BIZ promotion boosted the registration figures but web usage in the gTLD has traditionally been low compared to .COM and the ccTLDs.
As things are right now with many of the newly launched gTLDs struggling to obtain more than 100 new domain name registrations per day – I don’t think the .COM domain name is anywhere at risk just yet. The majority of the decline in new .COM domain name purchases can be attributed to the countless of parked and unused domain names that are slowly expiring. I myself have let 10 domain names expire so far this year that I have had for the past couple of years solely because I liked the names. I am sure that I am not the only one who has done so – and as we let these domain names expire this will inevitably effect the registration numbers.