New gTLDs Shed Over Half Million Registrations in Under 2 Weeks, But Why?

Total new gTLD registrations have taken a hit in recent days, dropping over half a million in under 2 weeks.

Total domains under management for the 1,218 new generic top level domains to have been delegated by ICANN peaked at 29.330 million on 14 April and have dropped to 28.803 million on 26 April, according to nTLDstats.com.

Those to have dropped big numbers of registrations were .xyz, the largest of the new gTLDs, which peaked at 6.651 million registrations on 20 March, had dropped to 6.594 million on 14 April and on 26 April had 6.208 million. Others in the top 10 by registration numbers to have shed registrations were .top, down from 4.509 million on 14 April to 4.477 million on 25 April, .club from 885,000 (14 April) to 852,000 (25 April).

The reasons for the declines don’t appear readily apparent. For .xyz they had over 3 million registrations in 3 days during a big promotion, but this was in early June 2016. For the other gTLDs that have suffered drops there are no significant registration jumps one or 2 years ago.