According to Verisign’s Zone File Information site the total amount of .com/.net registered as of today is 119,700,000 million
As of March 31st the amount of .com/.net domains stood at 116.7 million domain names.
As of the March Verisign State of the Domain Report “.com/.net registrations grew 8.1 % over the first quarter of 2011″ or 8.9 million during the first quarter of 2012”
So we have at basically 6 months later an increase of just 3 million domains.
At that rate the total annual increase would be 6 million from 2011-2012 March quarter.
Its something we will keep on eye on but for now it looks like growth in the .com/.net is slowing substantially.
Yep, and five years from now total .com and .net registrations will be 10%-15% LOWER than where they are today…all because of widespread use of ccTLD’s, gTLD’s, and decreasing monetary velocity worldwide.
Music.com will sell for less than $4 million
Slow as it may be…..6 million annual increase in registered domains this far into the game and with this economy are still very impressive. Still increasing sales at over 16,000 registrations a day when other businesses are fighting to stay even.
This has of course to do with all the new gTLD propaganda that has been going on for the last couple of years.
It has to slow down and it is NOT because of the new GTLD’s. It’s called “Critical Mass” and we have hit that point but there are phases of critical mass and this is just an early stage. Let’s count the businesses without a domain name. Every business bigger than a lemonade stand and not in the 3rd world has a domain or more. Most only need one and that is all they will ever get. It’s natural. They can never duplicate the initial expansion and gtld is not going to have 6 million registrations that quickly. And even then, it still may mean nothing depending how they are used. That could be a decade or more. Confusion is the 800 LB. elephant in the room that they can’t wave a magic wand and remove.
ALL .whatever will LEAK to the .com counterpart. Every single one of them. The ONLY thing that will vary is the size of that hole. So far the evidence of the only true test, shows a 61% leakage. That is more than a leak.
Advertising is about targeting simple things to simple people. Techies trying to duplicate the hoola hoop have SEVERE head winds.
The good news is I don’t think your math is right, Michael. You’re taking “new registrations” and comparing them to total growth of the zone file. The zone file takes new registrations but subtracts deletions. Also, the 23 million number you’re quoting must be total domain registrations, not .com and .net. If it’s 11% growth then it’s not on the .com and .net alone.
Rick
Lets not discount the 7% price increase in every 4 out of 6 years that Verisign has been whacking all domain owners with.
Domains would be the only product on earth not effected by increasing costs if there was not effect.
Now we see the effect
Andrew
There are 119M .com/net domains as of today
As of March 31st Verisign reported” The .com and .net ended the quarter with approximately 116.7 million domain names, a 2.5% increase over the fourth quarter of 2011 and an 8.1 percent increase over the first quarter of 2011.”
We are now at 119 million 6 months, later or a gain of 3M domains or just 6M million for the year if growth stays the same
no doubt things are slowing in the space.
Drops? People who didn’t get good names letting them go? The drop lists are filled with junk domains.
I 100% agree with MHB.
I know so many other domains (inc. myself) who have dropped lots of domains because of the price increases.
Many others will drop because they will get free or 99 cent new TLds.
It appears that Verisign is digging its own grave deeper and deeper with everty 7% price increase.
It will get even deeper when new TLDs come.
.Com price should be more like $4 per domain per year, not $8 0r $9.
That will increase the registrations and renewals and also keep the new TLD threat away.
Just my 2 cents.
Corection: Domains = domainers
It was about time…!
It was about time…!
Domains are/were not immune to the worldwide Economic crisis, if in doubt take a quick look at DNJournal YTD sale’s chart..
I’m with Domo Sapiens. It was about time. .Com had a stranglehold on internet commerce long enough.
I had another business idea and offered on a .Com about a month ago. The guy shot back a figure over $100k. I canceled the negotiations, bought the .Co domain for $25, and will roll with that instead.
Many small business owners are doing the same. They’re sick and tired of paying a King’s ransom for a .Com domain. Soon, we’ll all have more options. I maintain that we don’t need thousands of options, but some new gTLDs are welcomed.
In life, as in business, nothing lasts forever. The same can be said for .Com’s dominance. Folks like Frank Schilling, who invested $65 mil in the new gTLDs, are thinking forward. That’s the key. There’s the past, the present and the future. .Com will not be as powerful in the future. The writing is on the wall.
I’m not saying .Com will become irrelevant, but everything changes with time. .Com domainers had a great run. Some became multi-millionaires. But as a non-domainer looking in, I believe they got greedy at some point. The market became more speculative, as domainers increasingly sold to each other. It became akin to the real estate market before the crash. What’s a .Com domain worth? Whatever the next domainer is willing to pay. With fewer end users in sight.
The playing field is about to change. That’s not just my opinion. That’s the opinion of perhaps the greatest .Com domainer of all time, Frank Schilling. Even Frank doesn’t have a crystal ball, but one thing is certain… change in inevitable.
I think the main issue com and net registrations are slowing is because the only people that understand registering a dot com or dot net are domainers or SEO guys. The basic Joe Schmo off the street that starts a business basically knows nothing about the internet and goes to Godaddy, types in the name they want and its not available or someone wants 10k for it so they settle for biz, us, info or whatever because they don’t know any better and for the very small business it really doesn’t matter. The new gtld’s are going to make it even easier for people to get the name they want because ultimately they don’t care anyway because they don’t have some SEO guy telling them that COM, NET or ORG is a must.
The new gtld’s are scaring off a lot of regular domainers and future domainers that don’t see any upside to the new gtld’s and the majority of the big names in this industry don’t have a rock solid opinion on the gtld’s so a lot of people are just getting out of this business all together. Domaining is on a downward spiral and if you don’t see it you are blind. The internet is changing in a big way where a person can pick up a rock sold name that would normally cost 100’s of thousands of dollars in one of the new gtld’s for almost no money. Big money dot coms are going to lose a lot of value so if you have them you better start selling them. The writings on the wall just look at some of the big names in the industry such as Schilling or Mann who are all aggressively marketing their names to sell on Supermarket style websites with buy it nows and such. A couple years ago you would have never seen this.
They are gonna be a lot sicker when their sales sink and the kings ransom goes through the roof.
They have many options right now. But pissing ij the wind is a hard game to win.
Just another HUGE “I told you so” coming in the years to come.
@ Rick
Whatever you say. I guess you know better than Frank et al.
http://www.hosterstats.com/DomainNameCounts2011.php
http://www.hosterstats.com/DomainNameCounts2012.php
One thing wrong with the cited data is combining .Net and .Com. We need to know what part of the drop is .Com, and which part is .Net. The two TLDs are not equal, so we can’t use “.Com/.Net” together to make a decision. For instance, I registered BibisBomb(.)com, Romneyportal(.)com, Navy(.)portal.com, GraphicMultimedia(.)com, VolumeXXX(.)com, ORportal(.)com as in Oregon Portal, and hundreds more yesterday only in the .Com, and not in the .Net, so I suspect many Registrants are doing the same thing with .com.
Up to May, DUM, adds, deletes and renewals were all looking pretty healthy, according to the registry reports.
Remember that Q1 is seasonally strong.
As Kevin says above, Q1 is always a bit stronger. This is because of the Christmas Holidays effect with some countries.
The other thing that people seem to miss is that the drop and deletion pattern for TLDs runs on a yearly timescale. Some of the drops/deletions would be natural attrition from businesses ceasing over the year since registration or last renewal.
@FundingRoulette There’s a significant ccTLD/.com overlap in that people registering their ccTLD domain will also register the equivalent .com domain if it is available. It is only when a ccTLD really begins to dominate its local market (when the ccTLD:gTLD ratio is 2:1 or better) that ccTLD/com pairing becomes less important because most business is local and thus the focus of these new businesses is local rather than global.
since there is much less to make with PPC in parking, there are less registrations and more drops, where we use to find 20% of registered domains with revenue we now find less than 10%, so we are more carefull with registrations and drop more as well.
+1
I couldn’t say it any better.
I read somewhere even The Old guard is dropping those like hot potatoes
todd wrote:
“Big money dot coms are going to lose a lot of value so if you have them you better start selling them.”
—————
And with that, the panic selling begins…. perfect for savvy buyers looking at the long-term, who realize that all industries go through high and low periods, but not so good for sellers who will undoubtedly buy into the scare tactics.
If anyone thinks that they are going to be able to register let alone apply for generic domains under most of the gtlds then you had better wake up. Anyone dreaming about loans.coke or buyyourmedshere.health is totally in lala land.
Rick is perfectly correct, good .coms will become more valuable.
Grim, you nailed it. Spot on. Could not put it any better.
Anyone not seeing that…..I just feel sorry for.
The guys wet behind the ears are freaking out for no reason at all.
I can only PRAY there is a .Candy
.Property has already been applied for.
I ONLY see good things. Ask Larry how his xxx.com is doing after .xxx launched.
Ask Overstock how O.co is doing. And if there was an o.com, that guy would be laughing all the way to the bank.
That’s the proven reality. We don’t have to guess. We don’t even have to debate it.
The debate was over when Mr. Johnson said they lost 61% of all their customers to confusion.
So let them repeat failure 2000 more times looking for the one that could even be in the shadow of a .com
Let me repost your answer to Todd’s comments because this is what is going on here and it is CRYSTAL CLEAR and brings it all down to this:
todd wrote:
“Big money dot coms are going to lose a lot of value so if you have them you better start selling them.”
—————
And with that, the panic selling begins…. perfect for savvy buyers looking at the long-term, who realize that all industries go through high and low periods, but not so good for sellers who will undoubtedly buy into the scare tactics.
domen
“”One thing wrong with the cited data is combining .Net and .Com””
Unfortunately Verisign does this in their quarterly state of the domain report
Rick wrote
“That’s the proven reality. We don’t have to guess. We don’t even have to debate it.
The debate was over when Mr. Johnson said they lost 61% of all their customers to confusion.”
Of course this will happen in the beginning of all the extensions but I can promise you over time people will “get It” and understand what they are looking for. Mr. Johnson lost 61% of his traffic to the dot COM version because his is dot CO but that will not happen with the new gtld’s because they are not similar looking or similar sounding as COM and CO. Dot Coms are worth what they are right now because Google makes them worth what they are right now. As soon as thousands upon thousands upon thousands of gtld’s hit the market who knows how Google is going to rank them. You and I and all involved would be fools not to see what is happening. You (Rick) are supposed to be a so called predictor of the future so why don’t you see this? Frank Schilling, Berkens, etc……are all on board with gtld’s and slowly but slowly everyone else is getting on the train.
Your buddy Frank Schilling said this
“Frank recently said he can image a world of 400,000 new gTLD’s and obviously he is making a move into the right of the dot space.”
Wow, did I read that correctly, 400,000 gtld’s. SELL SELL SELL your names will be worthless or close to it. This WILL be the second dot com bubble.
todd wrote:
Of course this will happen in the beginning of all the extensions but I can promise you over time people will “get It”
————————————
I think you overestimate what people will “get.” (Or even care about “getting.”) More isn’t better. Can you name every Android device out there? Are you familiar with all their features, varying resolutions, the companies that make them, etc?
Apple, on the other hand, keeps their line of iPhones and tablets, simple. And while some people may hate Apple, (for the same envious reasons that people hated Microsoft), Apple “gets” it. More isn’t better. Keeping things simple, is.
Everyone knows .COM. They see it every day, since it’s attached to the best websites on the Internet. Not everyone will want or even care to want to learn about all these new gTLDs coming along. The average person won’t want to put in the effort. For them, the .COM sites they’ve been visiting for years provide everything they need, anyway. Why would they need more?
I have dropped lots of my domains and I’m feel so much better
because my portfolio is pure quality now. I believe dot com is going
to get so much abuse the next few years and most people will follow
the wrong path. Every new gTLD’s is like bee trying to be the Queen
Bee and the dot com will always be the Queen Bee. More honey to the hive
Some gTLD’s might work because the Internet does need more protection
and I believe you will not be able to view porn in 5-10 years without your
own adult account. I’m 100% sure people will say in 5-10 years time remember
when you could view free porn in search engines without adult accounts.
These type of gTLD’s might work
xxx
banks
kids
So if you have premium dot com in other subjects watch the traffic boom
and offers flow like Niagara Falls.
First I am not sure with the one comment, Why couldn’t Rick know more than Frank ? He has been at it a lot longer than Frank. Not saying he does or doesn’t, I think they are both knowledgeable, probably top two in the space.
I am not sure about the people who are championing thousands of new tlds are ? Are you developers ? If so I understand, if you are domainers I don’t.
1) With so many choices all the tlds will dilute themselves so more opportunity but not a healthy resale market.
2) In most new tlds the average domainer will not get the great, valuable names. How many great names did the average domainer get in .co launch ? a lot were grandfathered to the com.co owner, in .xxx ?
Sex.shop not going for $9.99 first to get there, Free.web or Games.app are most likely going to be expensive, and not saying there is anything wrong with that but it will make it harder for the average domainer to partake.
I agree with whoever said some domainers are confused and just leaving the business. That’s true, I talk to people all the time that say they are confused by everything they read and there is no easy money. It never was easy but they thought it, now the people who would bulk up the com/net reg numbers are doing something else.
Hybrid
So its going to depend on who gets the TLD on how some of these will operate
ICM has said that the matching owner of .xxx gets first dibs at .sex, .porn and .adult domains
Frank’s Unirestry has come out to say they won’t have restricted domains in the TLD they get so first come first served
I doubt many new gTLD will have a retail price of $9.99
Think $20-$30 is going to be the ballpark for a majority
Saying that people don’t get it doesn’t make sense to me. When I see advertising to visit websites the advertisement does not say “visit my website at http://www.whateverthenameis.com” it just says the name and the extensions so if I own boats.web how in the world will I not remember to visit boats.web? I myself and lots of others when they see a website either save it on their phone or take a picture of it to go to later on or a QR code. There will not be the confusion that everyone is talking about.
Grim wrote:
Apple, on the other hand, keeps their line of iPhones and tablets, simple. And while some people may hate Apple, (for the same envious reasons that people hated Microsoft), Apple “gets” it. More isn’t better. Keeping things simple, is.
Every single business that keeps it simple is successful. Complicate things to the consumer and its basically automatic failure. Apple keeps it simple because they can see way into the future and the future is more sales. Apple can make a phone right now that can do thousands of things more than the latest but they won’t because why sell a phone now that they can still sell in 5 years and not confuse and lose their customer base. Also they make small upgrades the basic foundation because no extra costs in retooling factories etc……which costs an enormous amount of money. This is why apples stock is so crazy high. They continue to ride their own existing wave without having to change anything but just adapt what they have. Less money out more money in.
Currently of course .com wins hands down the battle against alternative TLDs, but the trend could change. I’m not saying it’s bound to happen in the very near future, but it’s still possible, especially with all the new Internet users coming from huge countries like China, India, Brazil, etc. that are not tied to .com like the US. Remember, all these markets are sleeping giants that could/will wake up soon.