The Domain Name Industry Overview in 2020
The year 2020 was a difficult year for many industries. The Covid-19 pandemic has severely impacted the performance of many businesses and even caused many businesses to shut down for good, with the exception of some of the world’s biggest tech giants, particularly the FAANG (Facebook, Amazon.com, Apple, Netflix and Google parent Alphabet.)
What about the domain name industry? Are you curious to know how did it fare against the pandemic and what to expect from here on? If you are, then you have come to the right place!
One might expect the domain name industry to fare well, since the pandemic has driven the rapid adoption of digitalisation by many businesses. Naturally, it should only be right that more domains are being registered due to digitalisation, right? Surprisingly, it turns out that the performance of the domain name industry is merely mediocre, in fact it seems to be on the verge of declining.
Check out an overview statistic of the domain name industry in the year 2020 below:
Total number of domain name registrations
The year 2020 closed with 366.3 million domain name registrations across all top-level domains (TLDs). The number has seen an increase of 4.0 million, or 1.1%, compared to 2019.
Image source: https://www.verisign.com/en_US/domain-names/dnib/index.xhtml?section=executive-summary
The year-over-year growth, albeit a mere 1.1%, shows that the domain industry is still growing, with a study by Research and Markets stating a post Covid-19 Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of the industry at 6.7% over the analysis period 2020 through 2027.
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.com and .net made up for nearly half of the total domain name registrations
The year 2020 closed with a volume of 165.2 million for .com and .net combined in total, nearly half the volume among the total domain name registrations. Compared with 2019 year over year, the number increased by 6.3 million, or 4.0%. As of 31 December 2020, the total volume of .com was 151.8 million, whereas the total volume of .net was 13.4 million.
Image source: https://www.verisign.com/en_US/domain-names/dnib/index.xhtml?section=executive-summary
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Total number of country-code TLD (ccTLD) domain name registrations
The year 2020 closed with 158.9 million ccTLD domain name registrations. In comparison with the volume of 2019, there was an increase of 1.3 million, or 0.8%.
Total number of new gTLD (ngTLD) domain name registrations
The year 2020 closed with a total volume of 26.0 million ngTLD registrations. The volume saw a decrease of 3.3 million domain name registrations, or 11.2% year over year compared with 2019.
New gTLDs make up for 7.1% of the total 366.3 million domain name registrations, at a figure of 26.0 million. Breaking the 26.0 million figure down further, the top 10 most popular ngTLD in terms of percentage are:
Image source: https://www.verisign.com/en_US/domain-names/dnib/index.xhtml?section=new-gtlds
.icu (12.9%), .xyz (11.6%), .online (6.6%), .top (6.0%), .site (5.2%),
.club (3.7%), .vip (3.6%), .shop (2.9%), .app (2.8%), .work (2.1%), other (42.7%)
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Top 10 largest TLDs by number of reported domain name registrations
When the year 2020 ended, the largest TLDs by number of reported domain names were .com, .cn, .tk, .de, .net, .uk, .org, .nl, .ru and .br.
Image source: https://www.verisign.com/en_US/domain-names/dnib/index.xhtml?section=tlds
Top 10 largest ccTLDs by number of reported domain name registrations
When the year 2020 ended, the largest ccTLDs by number of reported domain names were .cn, .tk, .de, .uk, .nl, .ru, .br, .fr, .eu and .it.
Image source: https://www.verisign.com/en_US/domain-names/dnib/index.xhtml?section=cc-tlds
At the close of the year 2020, there were 307 global ccTLD extensions delegated in the root zone, including IDNs, with these top 10 ccTLDs comprising 65.4% of all ccTLD domain name registrations.
Conclusion
Overall, based on the data from Verisign’s Domain Name Industry Brief, the domain name industry performance was of a mixed result. It did not perform as assumed that the Covid-19 pandemic has pushed the industry for rapid growth, due to the move to online by many people and businesses. In fact, the poor performance of ngTLDs’ registration volume in 2020 has pulled down the overall domain name industry performance.
However, this is not an issue to worry about, as more people and businesses are increasingly moving online, which will definitely promote the domain name industry’s growth. The study by Research and Markets shows a post Covid-19 CAGR of the industry 6.7% over the analysis period 2020 through 2027. So, don’t miss the chance to build your domain name business by joining WebNIC as a reseller today!
(data source: Verisign, The Domain Name Industry Brief)
About WebNIC
WebNIC operates a digital reseller platform covering primarily domain name registration for 600 TLDs, web security services, email and cloud services. With offices in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Beijing, Taipei and Jakarta, we serve 5,000 active resellers in over 70 countries. With 20 years’ experience, we accelerate our partner’s growth through a robust platform, attentive support and wholesale pricing. Please visit https://www.webnic.cc/ for more information or email us at [email protected].