.Com update: Alibaba shows China’s woes, Squarespace steadies the ship

Alibaba shows China’s woes.

ICANN has published the latest data from Verisign covering the .com namespace. The data covers February 2024.

Looking at this February’s data compared to the same month a year ago shows some stark changes.

Verisign has talked about a decline in domain registrations in China, and you’ll note that Alibaba has 370k fewer registrations than it did a year ago.

Looking at the monthly numbers, Squarespace has stopped the bleeding compared to previous months post-Google Domains acquisition. Nevertheless, it generated 100,000 fewer .com registrations in February than a year ago under Google Domains. While overall demand for .com is dropping, we can assume that much of this 100,000 gap is going to competitors.

Below is a chart showing how the largest registrars did in terms of new registrations in February 2024, which are the latest available numbers. Note that the rankings include multiple registrar accreditations within families of registrars. You can see the list of registrars at the end of this post.

1. GoDaddy.com (NYSE: GDDY) 691,430 (766,342 in February 2024)
2. Namecheap Inc. 309,416 (267,401)
3. Tucows (NASDAQ: TCX) 171,327 (150,467)
4. Squarespace (NYSE: SQSP) 168,976 (264,456)
5. Newfold Digital 114,444 (166,623)
6. Gname.com 95,077 (77,360)
7. Dynadot 90,935 (54,186)
8. GMO 82,064 (77,776)
9. Wix 79,592 (69,824)
10. IONOS 78,359 (67,517)

Here’s the leaderboard of the top registrars in terms of total .com registrations under management as of the end of February.

1. GoDaddy 55,492,984 (56,494,091 in February 2024)
2. Newfold Digital 12,108,397 (12,926,368)
3. Tucows 10,930,469 (11,300,918)
4. Namecheap 9,678,811 (8,973,845)
5. Squarespace 8,165,945 (7,375,822)
6. TurnCommerce 5,969,148 (6,164,131)
7. IONOS 5,813,702 (5,504,915)
8. Gname 4,565,078 (3,201,177)
9. Alibaba 4,135,357 (4,404,155)
10. Team Internet Group 3,562,665 (3,575,252)

Many domain companies have multiple accreditations, and I’ve tried to capture the largest ones. See the notes below.

• GoDaddy includes GoDaddy, Wild West Domains, Uniregistry, GoDaddy Corporate Domains, MeshDigital, the 5 “Go Country” registrars, and 123 Reg
• Namecheap includes Namecheap and Spaceship
• Tucows includes Tucows, Enom, Ascio and EPAG
• Newfold Digital Includes PDR, Domain.com, FastDomain, Bigrock, Network Solutions, Register.com, MarkMonitor, SnapNames registrars, and Crazy Domains/Dreamscape. There are other Newfold registrars, but these are the biggest.
• Squarespace includes Squarespace and Google
• TurnCommerce Includes NameBright and DropCatch registrars
• IONOS includes Includes 1&1, PSI, Cronon, United-Domains, Arsys, and world4you
• Team Internet Group includes Key-Systems, 1API, Internet.bs, TLD Registrar Solutions, RegistryGate, Moniker, Instra