Expirations outpaced new registrations at GoDaddy in December.
ICANN has published the latest official data from Verisign (NASDAQ: VRSN) about the .com namespace. This registrar-by-registrar report covers December 2018.
Something interesting happened in December: GoDaddy’s .com domains under management (DUMs) dropped. I’ve tracked monthly numbers for a long time and don’t recall this happening in recent history.
The drop isn’t due to a large outbound transfer. In fact, GoDaddy’s net transfer loss was less than 10,000. It’s just that more .com names expired at GoDaddy than it got in new registrations.
Note that this only includes GoDaddy and Wild West Domains. It doesn’t include GoDaddy’s smaller registrars and the ones it picked up in the Host Europe Group acquisition.
Now, to the numbers. Here’s how registrars did in terms of new .com registrations.
1. GoDaddy.com* (NYSE: GDDY) 824,821 (865,438 in November)
2. Xin Net Technology Corporation 207,506 (152,143)
3. Alibaba (HiChina) 169,910 (312,227)
4. Tucows** (NASDAQ:TCX) 155,809 (175,148)
5. NameCheap Inc. 129,114 (157,607)
6. Web.com++ 101,629 (97,702)
7. NameSilo (CSE:URL) 94,849 (130,713)
8. Endurance+ (NASDAQ: EIGI) 91,577 (123,087)
9. Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL) 85,799 (88,236)
10. United Internet^ (FRA: UTDI) 60,004 (66,501)
Here’s the leaderboard of the top registrars in terms of total .com registrations as of the end of December 2018.
1. GoDaddy* 49,354,689 (49,370,531 in November)
2. Tucows** 12,583,119 (12,659,835)
3. Endurance+ 7,124,825 (7,179,580)
4. Web.com++ 6,726,237 (6,732,478)
5. Alibaba 6,248,273 (6,192,801)
6. United Internet^ 5,640,149 (5,666,856)
7. Namecheap 4,535,855 (4,515,221)
8. Xin Net Technology Corporation 2,987,431 (2,792,514)
9. Google 2,106,955 (2,057,844)
10. GMO 1,953,479 (1,964,580)
Many domain companies have multiple accreditations and I’ve tried to capture the largest ones. See the notes below.
* Includes GoDaddy and Wild West Domains
** Includes Tucows and Enom
+ Includes PDR, Domain.com, FastDomain and Bigrock. There are other Endurance registrars, but these are the biggest.
++ Includes Network Solutions and Register.com
^ Includes 1&1, PSI, Cronon, United-Domains, Arsys and world4you
First peak oil and now peak domains..
If .com sneezes, the new GTLD’s will catch a cold!
Full disclosure: I transferred away around 600 .com’s from GD since December 2018.
Any specific reason why you did that?
Prob just domainers not renewing tons of the crappy brandbucket type names , people went way to crazy with the hand regs over that last few years
Where can I find the raw data in the report?
The info is at: https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/com-2014-03-04-en
Actually people are moving away from GoDaddy. There is bad word to mouth about GoDaddy spreading. I transferred out all my domains from GoDaddy.
GoDaddy commission on escrow sales of existing domains is outrageus and greedy. i just sold a .com to China this week and commissions were 1/10th using Escrow.com