2019 report: Domain market grows – Registrar consolidation increases

CENTR has published the CENTRstats Global TLD Report Q4/2019 . The report covers the global status and registration trends in all top-level domains (legacy gTLDs, new gTLDs and ccTLDs), with additional focus on the European ccTLD market.

Highlights from the report:

• The global TLD market grew an estimated 3.0% YOY to 372 million domains at January 2020, driven mostly from gains in .com, .icu, .site and .uk.
• Across the top 300 largest TLDs, the median year-on-year growth rate was 2.6% at January 2020, down from 4.5% a year earlier.
• The median growth of European ccTLDs was recorded at 1.6% at January 2020, an increase of 0.5% from its low in April 2019.
• Over 2019, data shows that an increasing number of domains have been transferred between registrars, which may be linked to ongoing consolidation in their businesses.
• The median buy price for a registration across European ccTLDs is 13.6 EUR (including tax / 1 year). Many registrars also offer promotional prices, which at January were recorded at a median rate of 6.0 EUR.
• The top 300 largest gTLDs’ median growth was 2.4%, a rate which was largely stable over the course of 2019.
• After many months of increasing growth rates, the largest TLD, .com has begun to level off and completed 2019 at 4.6% YOY – a figure still well above the top 300 median and most other mature markets.

The pdf version of the report can be found here.