Explosive Domain Name registrations in times of Economic Crisis

Or a better title for this post would have been; “A Slap in the face of Domaining Doom Predictors”

From the day that signaled the beginning of the current economic crisis, many so called domaining experts have come up with all sorts of predictions; from massive dropping of domain names to a global meltdown of the domaining industry. The Daily Domainer has even gone to predict the death of Domain Parking. I wonder where they are coming from when the domaining industry is flourishing like never before. A new TLD is being launched almost every half yearly, domain parking programs are propping up everywhere (Google’s Domain Park being one of the conspicuous names) and new domain name registrations are increasing all across the board. The latter is the focus of this post.

Verisign recently released a report showing that 24 million new domain names were registered last year. That is when the rest of the world was starting to feel the prelude to the current economic crisis. In total, almost 177 million domain name registrations were recorded at the conclusion of the year, with 10.1 names registered in the 4th quarter, across all TLDs. That is a 16% increase in domain registrations compared to year 2007. I ask… how is the domaining industry headed for doom, when people are taking up domain names at an ever increasing pace?

ccTLDs registrations also increased; 71.1 million names were registered that totaled to an increase of 22% when compared to the previous year. This huge increase can be attributed to a mass move towards geo targeted domains and the crowding of popular gTLDs. Overall, .cn, .de and .uk remained the big three ccTLDs while .com, .cn, .de, .net and .org made up the 5 biggest extensions in terms of base size.

One may argue that figures may be wrong; an unmonitored survey by one company can not justify the numbers being displayed here. However, you don’t need surveyed figures to prove that the domaining industry is thriving. Just see the number of websites coming up each day. Without  proper domain names, those websites would not survive the competitive cyberspace. Domain registrars are making huge profits each year and the mainstream players are not showing any signs of being economically challenged.

So where are the “end of domaining” predicators that the “experts” have been talking about?

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