.Com Winners & Losers: Big changes ahead

The Winners & Losers chart will be undergoing some shakeup.

Every month I publish my .Com Winners & Losers report based on the most recent data Verisign has submitted to ICANN. This data is made public three months after the end of the relevant month.

We have the official results from October now, and there are a couple things to note.

First, Tucows acquired eNom last month. Since the data in this month’s report is pre-acquisition, I’m keeping eNom as part of Rightside in this month’s report.

Second, note Tucows’ big jump in outbound transfers. I suspect this is because Tucows started sending its expired domain name inventory to GoDaddy at the end of September. When a GoDaddy Auctions customer wins a Tucows domain name it is transferred to GoDaddy. This will increase Tucows’ outbound numbers and improve GoDaddy’s numbers in the transfer charts.

There might be another wrinkle coming. Part of the eNom acquisition was a partnership for NameJet. Will we see Tucows’ expired domains move to NameJet in the future?

Now, let’s get to the charts…

Here are the top 5 registrars in October in terms of new .com registrations:

1. GoDaddy* 860,240
2. Rightside** 209,880
3. PublicDomainRegistry 151,264
4. Tucows 126,868
5. HiChina 103,896

Here are the top five registrars for net inbound transfers:

1. HiChina +63,985
2. TurnCommerce (NameBright) +16,795
3. eName +13,075
4. Uniregistry +8,874
5. Google +7,177

On the flip side, these five registrars saw the biggest net outflow of .com domain names due to transfers:

1. Tucows -46,582 (see commentary above)
2. Bizcn.com -44,717
3. GoDaddy -25,699
4. 22Net -18,449
5. Web.com*** -9,524

*Includes GoDaddy and Wild West Domains **This is prior to Tucows’ acquisition of eNom and includes eNom and Name.com *** Includes Network Solutions and Register.com, but not drop catching registrars.