Christmas holidays mark the end of the year and now we can take a look back at domain and Internet growth in 2019. Note that current data is available up to the third quarter of 2019.
Top-level domain registrations show an increase of over 17.4 million when compared to last year, now just a little bit shy of 360 million domain registrations by the end of the third quarter of 2019. This is indeed good news, though there are more details on specific domain categories.
The most popular domain is .COM and follows .NET
My guess is that no one would argue .COM would be the domain with the highest number of registrations (around 144 million), while the second gTLD that follows is .NET (13.4 million registrations), again by the end of the third quarter.
No surprises there, though when talking about generic top-level domains we must note that the relative renown domain extension .ORG may be in for nasty weather, with possible price increases.
Country code domain growth
The total number of country-code domain registrations is 161.8 million at the end of the 3rd quarter 2019 with a good 8.4% increase over last year.
It may be hard to stumble upon a website using .TK domain extension but this ccTLD holds the highest number of domain registrations with a little over 25 million. Note this domain still retains its free domain name registration policy, hence the high registration numbers.
The ripple effect from the so-called “trade wars” with the US and China has not been felt yet in the domain industry as .CN is the strongest ccTLD with around 23 million registrations.
Europe is another economically strong region that is represented by .DE with 16.3 million and .UK with 13.3 million domain registrations, followed by .NL and . RU both a bit under 6 million.
The fact that total ccTLD domain registrations surpassed .COM domain is important as it shows a shift to domains with better namespace availability.
New gTLD holding steady
New generic top-level domains are aimed at a niche audience of the specific business or industry branches, and as such individuals cannot retain a large domain user base.
Still, we can note that ngTLDs are holding steady with a positive growth of 4% over last year at around 24 million domain registrations.
Conclusion
The domain industry growth is something to be expected though we still need to look over the final quarter statistics to have a complete overview of 2019 because a considerable number of domain registrations revolve around November and Black Friday deals which are not included in this data.
