.Com rankings: a fall in China

These are the fastest growing and biggest domain name registrars for .com domains.

ICANN has published the latest official data from Verisign (NASDAQ: VRSN) about the .com namespace. This registrar-by-registrar report covers February 2022.

Digging through the numbers, it appears China is part of the reason for the decline in new .com registrations.

In January and February 2021, the top 9 Chinese registrars (or those that cater to China) by .com volume generated 550,000 new .com registrations. In the same months this year, that plummeted to 383,000.

To be sure, Chinese registrars tend to have “lumpy” registration numbers in general, and I believe this is because domain investors buy in bulk through them. For example, Hongkong Domain Name Information Management Co., had over 90,000 registrations in January last year, only to fall to 30,000 the next month. This year, it has accounted for less than 2,000 .com registrations in the first two months of the year.

In other ranking news, Turn Commerce has overtaken IONOS in total .com domains under management.

Here’s how registrars did in terms of new .com registrations in February:

1. GoDaddy.com* (NYSE: GDDY) 759,973 (812,923 in January)
2. Namecheap Inc. 243,030 (269,200)
3. Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL) 167,140 (175,155)
4. Newfold Digital+ 156,311 (177,528)
5. Tucows** (NASDAQ:TCX) 133,795 (140,218)
6. Dynadot 107,616 (126,328)
7. TurnCommerce 107,236 (119,384)
8. Wix 78,113 (85,899)
9. GMO 71,704
10. Ionos 68,681 (73,030)

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

1. GoDaddy* 56,443,570 (56,444,665 in January)
2. Newfold Digital+ 13,447,563 (13,558,952)
3. Tucows** 12,088,015 (12,150,467)
4. Namecheap 8,312,660 (8,279,345)
5. Alibaba 6,287,267 (6,375,870)
6. TurnCommerce++ 5,658,370 (5,602,999)
7. IONOS# 5,652,603 (5,679,597)
8. Google 5,210,094 (5,112,777)
9. CentralNic## 3,186,387 (3,539,667)
10. NameSilo 2,684,633 (2,673,399)

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

* Includes GoDaddy, Wild West Domains, Uniregistry, GoDaddy Corporate Domains and 123 Reg
** Includes Tucows, Enom, Ascio and EPAG
+ Includes PDR, Domain.com, FastDomain, Bigrock, Network Solutions, Register.com, SnapNames registrars, and Crazy Domains/Dreamscape. There are other Newfold registrars, but these are the biggest.
++ Includes NameBright and DropCatch registrars
# Includes 1&1, PSI, Cronon, United-Domains, Arsys and world4you
## Includes Key-Systems, 1API, Internet.bs, TLD Registrar Solutions, RegistryGate, Moniker, Instra