.COM Registrations Grew 5% in the Past Year But Verisign Reports Total Regs Down Due to New gTLD Slide

Verisign (the administrator of the .com and .net TLDs) has released their latest quarterly Domain Name Industry Brief covering the 1st quarter of 2021. The quarter ended with 363.5 million domain name registrations across all top-level domains (TLDs) worldwide, a slight decrease of less than 1% from both the previous quarter and the same point one year ago when then total was 366.8 million.

All of the decline in total registrations came from non .com categories, especially new gTLDs. That category plummeted over 29% year over year, losing 9.5 million registrations to land at 22.8 million at the end of 1Q-2021. That number is also a 12% drop from the previous quarter. 

ccTLDs also slipped but much less precipitously. Total country code TLD registrations edged down less than 1% (0.6% to be exact) to 156.5 million from the same point a year ago. They were off 1.5% from the previous quarter.

In contrast, the .coms continued to grow despite competition from hundreds of other TLDs. At the end of 1Q-2021 there were 154.6 million .coms registered, a healthy 5% increase from the 147.3 million registered at the same point last year. The .coms added 2.8 million domains in the most recent quarter, a 1.8% rise from the end of 4Q-2020. Meanwhile, Verisign's .net has remained unchanged with approximately 13.4 million registrations on the books, the same number we saw at the end of the last quarter as well as year over year.

(Posted June 4, 2021)

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