Over 53% of all new gTLD’s are registered to domain holders in China.
Only 10.8% of all new gTLD’s are registered to Domain holders in the United States.
According to stats newly complied by ntldstats.com, who has now broken down new gTLD registrants by the country where the domain name is registered, China accounts for 53.6% of all new gTLD registrations or 8,784,383 of the 16,396,564 new gTLD registered across all extensions.
12.1% of all new gTLD’s are registered under privacy or just under 2 million domains (meaning those domain names could be registered by anyone, anywhere).
Registrants from the United States accounts for 1,765,380 or 10.8% of all new gTLD’s
Other than China, Privacy and the United States all other countries are in the single percentage digits.
Here are the top 10 countries where new gTLD are registered according to ntldstats.com, including the number of domains and the percentage that number represents of all gTLD registrations.
| Country | Domains | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | China | 8,784,363 | 53.58% |
| 2. | Whois Proxy (Unknown Registrant) | 1,976,721 | 12.06% |
| 3. | United States of America | 1,765,380 | 10.77% |
| 4. | Germany | 507,682 | 3.10% |
| 5. | United Kingdom (Great Britain) | 337,058 | 2.06% |
| 6. | Cayman Islands | 306,234 | 1.87% |
| 7. | Canada | 242,248 | 1.48% |
| 8. | Japan | 239,654 | 1.46% |
| 9. | France | 213,802 | 1.30% |
| 10. | Indonesia | 136,412 | 0.83% |
It should be noted that out of the 306,234 registrations in the Cayman Islands 230,000 of them are by North Sound Domains, a company related to Uniregistry which is a new gTLD registrar.
More interesting that these numbers would be the spread/disversification over the nGtlds by each of these countries to display the real depth of nGtld use (if not hoarding)..
Use?
Assuming (following the data/pattern) that from the Private Regs (2 MM + or -) 50% are from Chinese Investors…
Then you have roughly a total of 10 MM registrations made by Chinese (out of the 16 MM) ..close to 65%
Then add all the Regs (hoarding variety) made by the Registries and Registrar themselves such as the one based in the Cayman Islands, … what you get is a very WORRISOME ‘bubblicious’ outlook.
I guess the China portion is rather an unexpected (and perhaps unpleasant) development for ICANN. They apparently had in mind those traditional (Western) “mainstream” domain users/investors when they designed all these new GTLDS scheme. The 10% US portion should be a sure disappointment to them. Sorry about that. IMHO ICANN should thank the Chinese domain buyers and bow to them who unexpectedly gave it a lot of money for a commission.
And who saved its face.
This is just attempted buyouts of numeric, and letter chip domains at dollar store prices, I don’t think these averages can sustain, there is no retail market, just speculator.
Yes, that may be. But a speculator is still a legitimate buyer. And he/she is doing it as their business at their risks. XYZ is entering its 3rd anniversary with even increasing total volume of registrations. I should say it’s sustainable.
Not surprised that China owns over half of the New gTLD’s and that number will probably increase, .Club is probably a big chunk of that 53% total.
The next China domain name craze will be India and whenever .Web comes out, that will be the new .Com.
I was surprised how many GTLD extensions can be had for 88 cents, everyday price.
Short term profits to be had, as renewals will have to be scaled back also, otherwise .info repeat.
It’s a stark mismatch between expectations and reality. The vast majority of nTLDs were conceived for English-speaking or European markets. Registries largely ignored China when applying with ICANN and during their initial public marketing. Yet Chinese registrants now account for more than half of all nTLD registrations, repurposing even suffixes that weren’t meant for them!
Western demand for the new extensions has been in the doldrums, whereas we’ve all seen the whirlwind of over-the-top Chinese speculation. It’s been a hurricane, visible from space! Any TLD weighing under $1 it sends flying!
By next year, this percentage will slip. Renewal rates in China will be lower than elsewhere. Those $1 first-year purchases mostly can’t stand up to full prices. The kind of appreciation speculators saw during the 2015 surge was never sustainable and has already ceased. But for the hope of flipping to other flippers, the registrants behind most of these nTLD domains have no reason at all to buy what they’ve bought.
Alongside the dropoff in Chinese registrations, I’d expect public awareness in the West to slowly grow. After all, that’s where these nTLDs were meant to take root.
In my opinion this has very little to do with Eastern demand for domains extensions. These Chinese registrations are simply for capital flight purposes. They’re aware that these domains are practically worthless but, when you have hundreds of billions of dollars to launder, domains are easy to hide, not well understood by authorities, and just a small part of a much larger asset portfolio. Much like a stock portfolio that has both blue chip and penny stocks, the Chinese are buying physical property, commodities, shares, new gTLDs and anything else they can get their hands on.
Some domainers see these few million registrations as a significant indicator of genuine demand, but we’re talking $20 million worth of domain registrations spread over two years, when Chinese capital flight is running at $40 billion per month. This isn’t demand for an worthwhile product, it’s just a tiny portion of a vast sum of stolen money that will eventually dry up.
@Reality,
Capital flight was a factor in the Chinese surge. That’s generally recognized, I think. Indeed, many high-profile sellers in this sector have written articles pointing to CHIPs and numerical domains as vehicles for moving money out of China. Their principle selling points in this regard have been safety, convenience, and freedom from regulation (which are all pretty convincing). Oh, and price stability (which isn’t).
Capital flight is not the only factor, though. We’d also have to look at speculators – inside and outside China – chasing future growth. That includes plenty of innocent risk-taking and arguably some less innocent manipulation. But that’s a separate phenomenon from capital flight as such. And, of course, there are end users somewhere in the mix – largely drowned out by traders, but they’re there.
There are 16 million new gTLDs registered, 53% of which are Chinese owned, roughly 8.5 million domains. Most of those are extensions that can be bought for one dollar. If we’re generous and say the average price paid was eight dollars, that’s about $51 million total, spread over two years. Two million dollars per month. The Chinese are currently laundering 40,000 million dollars per month. These aren’t end users, and they’re barely even speculators. They’re just people desperately trying to launder in any way possible. The question that also arises is how much of the other 47% are also Chinese owned. If you’re trying to launder money why would you put a Chinese address on the whois? 😉
I was surprised to read a blog report from the .ME registry that .ME is the 4th most popular extension in China. I assume .com, .cn are #1 & #2
http://domain.me/1-million-me-domains-milestone-and-more/
@Joseph
I concur with your prediction/projection per the demand from China. I attribute this to the wechat.com phenomenon of pushing investment advice via chatbots — clever marketers used this, and the gtld tulips sprouted throughout China .
The only reason I believe .me is popular there is because one of the most popular sites/companies (a unicorn from China) uses the .me extension. But I could be wrong. Maybe they just like short extensions.
But… but… it’ll be different this time! Nope, they’re all worthless junk just like .biz, .info, .pro, .travel, .tv… Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.
@Reality,
In reality, those TLDs you just cited as junk do sell for considerable sums of money from time to time; and they are sometimes put to use.
May I suggest a more empirical, less dogmatic attitude?
A few speculators “sometimes” paying too much money for something that they’ll use “sometimes”, but mostly hope that they can resell for more isn’t demand. It’s the greater fool theory at work. They’re worthless junk.
@Reality,
You’re lumping all types of buyers together. Yes, there are foolish purchases. Yes, there are bubbles. But there are also end users and domainers who sell to end users.
In this specific case there are very, very few end users.
Preaching to the choir.
Take .cloud for instance, I have yet to see an end user sale, they were crazy over 3N, and 4N .cloud domains, there is no aftermarket for this, how many numerics can you have on an unlimited amount of extensions.
Namecheap sells so many GTLD’s for 88 cents all day long.
Aftermarket / Premium Sales
.XYZ
9.xyz$175,0002015
6.xyz$125,0002015
8.xyz$81,7152015
88.xyz$70,0002016
xx.xyz$59,3792015
yy.xyz$38,5582015
22.xyz$26,5282015
zz.xyz$17,5822015
87.xyz$15,4232015
jjj.xyz$9,6002016
https://namestat.org/xyz
Registrants may state they are from a country via whois info but content of website may say others – just saying. Good to keep things in perspective.Then again, registration of domain name with no content – also gives a different meaning.
if you want see details and sales :
https://namestat.org
click on each extensions
for example .top
https://namestat.org/top
a.top $96,377 2014
6.top $93,785 2015
m.top $93,785 2015
1.top $80,708 2015
9.top $80,708 2015
c.top $80,620 2015
g.top $80,613 2015
8.top $78,851 2015
y.top $78,571 2015
88.top $40,306 2015