A Selection of Data Recently Released by Several Registrars

3 days ago 1

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Recently Namecheap released their 2024 Domain Insights & Trends Report. You can read a summary of the report online, or download the full report at this link.

As well as present some highlights from that report, I also include in this article insights recently shared by Todd Han, CEO of Dynadot, through his DynaTodd X account, as well as GoDaddy release of new top keyword data from Afternic.

Who Are The Big Registrars?

Below are the top 5 registrars in terms of number of domain names under management, as shard by Todd Hann of Dynadot a couple of weeks ago.

GoDaddy 89.8 million, 11.5%
Namecheap 23.6 million, 3.0%
Tucows 13.4 million, 1.7%
Squarespace 9.6 million, 1.2%
Dynadot 7.1 million, 0.9%

While GoDaddy is by far the largest, it should be noted that it still only represents about 11.5% of total global registrations. The thousands of ICANN accredited registrars may each be relatively small, but together they account for a lot of registrations. You can be in the top 5 registrars in the world, while still having only about 1% of total registrations.

2024 Namecheap Registration by Extension

It is no surprise that .com was the most registered TLD at Namecheap during 2024, with just under 3.7 million registrations. About 39% of Namecheap domain registrations from 2024 were in .com. That is slightly down from 2023 data, but I am not sure if the decrease is statistically significant.

I was somewhat surprised that three different new extensions, .shop, .xyz and .site, all had more registrations than the legacy extensions .org, .info or .net at Namecheap. Below is a graphic of the entire top 20 from their report.

The most-registered domain extension at Namecheap during 2024. Data and image provided by Namecheap 2024 Domain Insights and Trends Report.

Many of the extensions on the above list are sharply discounted for first year which can really impact registration numbers.

Also, we should not place too much emphasis on what is seen at any one registrar, since the relative pricing across different registrars can impact registration numbers pretty dramatically, even with the difference is just pennies.

Most investors use price comparison tools, such as

and many will, if they are happy with other aspects, register domain names where the pricers are most competitive, even if the differences are rather small.

You can get a better handle on registration data overall by looking at sites such as nTLD Stats. nTLD Stats gives the breakdown for each TLD by registrar. For example, for .shop, Namecheap is the top registrar, with GoDaddy second.

nTLD Stats only covers new domain extensions, but the following sites cover all extensions:

We see right away big differences from the Namecheap 2024 registration data and the industry-wide numbers. While .shop was the second most-registered extension in the Namecheap report, .de, .org, .net, .cn and numerous others had more registrations than .shop in the DomainTools data.

Are Namecheap Customers Mainly Investors?

One of the most interesting insights from the Namecheap report was the breakdown of number of domains held per client. I was somewhat surprised to see that 59.4% of Namecheap customers have a single domain name, at least at Namecheap, and only 2.2% of customers have more than 25 domains registered at Namecheap, and just 0.4% have more than 100 domain names there. The following graphic shows the actual numbers.

Only 0.4% of Namecheap customers have more than 100 domain names registered at Namecheap, and just over 59% of Namecheap customers have only a single domain name there. Data and image provided by Namecheap 2024 Domain Insights and Trends Report.

It the vast majority of Namecheap customers are domain users, this means that a significant number of potential clients for aftermarket names may be among site users, something important for investors.

It should be kept in mind that these are the statistics just for domains held at Namecheap. For example, although I currently have fewer than 100 domains at Namecheap, the total number of domains I have somewhere is far more. I think most investors use at least a few different registrars.

Namecheap Auctions

Namecheap now auction expired domain names that were registered at Namecheap, as well as from their companion registrar Spaceship. They shared data in the annual report with respect to auctions, including that 104,411 domain names sold in auction at Namecheap during 2024, with the top sale being telepath.com that sold for $100,501.

.XYZ At Dynadot

Todd Han, Dynadot CEO, shared a glimpse of extensions with considerable traction. One extension that he shared on X was the number of .xyz registrations at Dynadot. Although there have been a couple of bumps, for the most part the extension has shown strong registration growth since 2018 that continues.

You can see the overall .XYZ registration plot at nTLD Stats. Currently Dynadot is the fourth-highest registrar for .xyz, trailing Namecheap, GoDaddy and GMO.

The .CC Rush at Dynadot

Todd also shared a registration plot for .cc. Todd described registrations as “through the roof”, and asked for insights on what was driving the registrations. I don’t have a good answer to that, as it does not appear that there has been a dramatic increase in aftermarket sales volume in the extension, where many sales are for short numerics.

Dynadot had 281,857 .cc domains registered the day the data was shared. Those were held among 5645 accounts, for an average of about 50 .cc domains per account.

Afternic Monthly Popular Keywords

Each month Afternic shares the top keywords for domains recently sold. This week, keyword data for October 2024 was released.

Top keyword data at Afternic for October 2024. Words like ‘the’ have been filtered out.

My and AI are always near the top, and this month was no exception. Recently @James Iles did a nice analysis: What we can learn after nearly 2 years of keyword chart releases?. He found that the following keywords appeared in every, or almost every, monthly set.