Parked domains make up the bulk of new TLD registrations.
Verisign analyzed registrations of new top level domain names to determine how second level registrations under these new domain names are being used.
The analysis determined that just 3% of domains registered so far are being used for a “business website” and the majority of domains are parked:
The breakdown is much more nuanced than what the company presents about its own TLDs, .net and .com. When it decides to report the numbers, the company splits .com/.net into three buckets: one page websites, multiple page website and no websites. The breakdown amongst these groups is typically around 20%/65%/15%. (I’ve asked Verisign if it will run the same analysis it ran for new TLDs for .com.)
Verisign provides a number of caveats and points out outliers in the data. For example, the parked page percentage would be much lower if Web.com wasn’t registering and parking .xyz domain names on behalf of its customers.
It’s worth noting that every new top level domain name registration is less than 8 months old. I suspect the numbers for .com domains registered less than 8 months are even more skewed to parked pages than the slash line I noted above.
Verisign is careful not to draw any conclusions from the data, only noting that it’s “early days for new gTLDs” and that “this analysis offers an interesting snapshot of the first few months of new gTLD general availability.”
Of course, we all know where Verisign stands on new TLDs.
Joseph Peterson says
23.7% of current nTLD registrations belong to .XYZ, if I’m not mistaken.
Maybe we can assume that .XYZ is disproportionately likely to be found in parked pages. In that case, due to the preponderance of .XYZ domains on the books, the overall PPC category percentage will be larger (and other category percentages will be smaller) with .XYZ included than they would appear with .XYZ excluded.
The extreme case, which surely isn’t true, would be if 100% of .XYZ registrations were found in the PPC category.
On that assumption, if we remove all .XYZ domains from consideration, we’d be left with the following percentage of nTLD domains labeled “Pay per Click”:
( 41% – 23.7% * 100% ) / 76.3%
= 22.7%
Just 22.7% of non-.XYZ nTLD domains parked, in that case. Quite the difference!
On that same assumption of 100% parked .XYZ domains, then with .XYZ excluded, the other category percentages will increase by a factor of 1 / 76.3% = 131%.
So that gives results as follows for nTLDs apart from .XYZ:
Pay Per Click: 22.7%
Error: 22.3%
Other: 14.4%
Redirect: 13.1%
No Content to Classify: 13.1%
Holding Page: 10.5%
Business: 3.9%
Are those numbers correct? No, they’re not. They represent the extreme assumption that ALL .XYZ domains are parked pages.
Taking for granted that Verisign’s study is itself accurate, then the reality for non-.XYZ nTLD domains must fall somewhere between the numbers I’ve calculated and those reported by Verisign, which DO include .XYZ.
This indicates a potential drop in the “Pay Per Click” percentage from 41% to as low as 23%, if one were to assume all .XYZs are parked.
Importantly, though, that same assumption cannot raise the percentage of non-.XYZ nTLD domains labeled “Business” even as high as 4%.
So, yes, .XYZ’s registrar stuffing has helped Verisign make its case with a larger parking percentage. But even excluding .XYZ, the percentage of nTLDs in use as “business” sites (according to Verisign’s criteria) wouldn’t be more than 3.9%.
John McCormac says
Not exactly nuanced. The problem with the size of .XYZ is that it really does skew the PPC figures overall. Taking the entire set of new gTLDs as a whole can be somewhat misleading due to the gTLDs being at various stages of launch.
Not all .XYZ domains are parked on PPC. However approximately 90.27% of them are. These are the results from the 26th June survey that ran on the top ten new gTLDs (full TLD surveys).
http://www.hosterstats.com/xyz-website-usage-survey.php
Some of the Verisign’s results are similar.
Some of the other new gTLDs show more complex patterns with redirects (.PHOTOGRAPHY) and brand protection and others usage categories (.BERLIN).
In early July, I ran 110,000 domain web usage surveys on .COM and some ccTLDs. These were statistical surveys rather than full TLD surveys. A statistical survey samples enough domains so that the general trends can be seen. The results are very different from those of .XYZ.
http://www.hosterstats.com/com-website-usage-survey.php
Verisign seems to be treating Eurid’s survey as some kind of reference and it really isn’t. Eurid introduced its survey because I ran a 2 million domain survey on .EU ccTLD and proved that it had quite a different usage pattern to an ordinary ccTLD. Eurid’s categories are oversimplified because of its human based approach to a very small set of domains (only 5,000). It isn’t exactly clear what a “business” website is and if one was to use online shopping carts and payments systems indications, then the percentage of e-commerce/business sites would be far smaller since the majority of business websites are brochureware websites.
Another important aspect is that PPC isn’t necessarily speculative. Some PPC parking is due to registrars automatically parking undeveloped domains on PPC landers. Sedo still has one of the biggest programmes of this kind of registrars. Godaddy also parks undeveloped domain names.
Joseph Peterson says
Good points.
Yesterday I asked Verisign for clarification on or examples of their “other” category, which (according to their report) accounts for nearly a quarter of an nTLD such as Berlin. “Business” could be overly limiting; so conceivably some genuine domain usage might be found classified as “other”. Hard to guess without details on Verisign’s proprietary criteria …
Still haven’t heard back.
John McCormac says
It could be the “For Sale” domains combined with some other categories. As it was about 20.43% in .BERLIN.