2024Q1:362.4 million registrations for all top-level domains, up 2.5 million from the beginning of the year!

According to the latest edition of Verisign's Domain Name Industry Briefing, the domain name industry returned to growth in a seasonally strong first quarter, despite the continued downturn in .com domains.

The report shows that at the end of March, there were 362.4 million registrations for all top-level domains, up 2.5 million, or 0.7 percent, from the beginning of the year, and up 7.5 million, or 2.1 percent, over the 12-month period.

The growth came despite continued declines in Verisign's own .com and .net domains, with DNIB saying its flagship .com domain fell from 159.6 million to 159.4 million, while .net was flat at 13.1 million.

Verisign said the two top-level domains lost a total of 300,000 domains in the quarter, compared with 2.3 million in the same period last year.

Country code top-level domain registrations reached 139.5 million, up 1.2 million, or 0.9 percent, from the beginning of the year, and up 3.7 million from a year ago.

Russia's .ru overtook the Netherlands' .nl to become the fourth largest ccTLD. 6.4 million of the former and 6.3 million of the latter were registered, but Verisign's methodology suggests that some 770,000 Cyrillic .РФ domains also count as .ru.

The top 10 country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) all grew, with the exception of .uk and .it.

The new gTLDs performed equally strongly, with 33.3 million registrations at the end of the quarter, an increase of 1.5 million (4.7%) over the previous quarter and 6 million (22.1%) over the same period last year.

Perhaps because the raw volume numbers have begun to make Verisign's TLDs look bad compared to previous editions, DNIB has begun to report the estimated renewal rates for many of the TLDs that DNIB tracks.

As you might expect, renewal rates for the new gTLDs are low. While established TLDs like .com typically have a renewal rate of around 75%, when you look at the large 2012 TLDs (e.g., .xyz, .online, and .top), that number plummets to 20%.