Afnic published a report that looked at consolidation in 2017 for legacy tlds. The report looks at retention rates for legacy tlds and cctlds. Projections are put forward relating to annual creations and deletions. New gtlds were not included in the report. The key takeaway being, the level of deletions should reach and exceed the level of creations in H1 2017 for the two segments of TLDs.
From the report:
For the purposes of this study, we relied on ICANN reports for Legacy gTLDs and ccTLDs, and on the statistics of members of the Council of European National Top Level Domain Registries (CENTR) with more than 50,000 domain names in stock. Since the new TLDs introduced to the market in 2014 are still something of a “new development” we have not included them in this edition of the Afnic Domain Name Industry Report, but it is quite obvious that they will have to be included in the future.
Figure 1 shows that for the two segments of TLDs, the pace of creation is less dynamic than that for deletions. This indicates that all other things being equal, the level of deletions should reach and exceed the level of creations in H1 2017 for the two segments of TLDs. Naturally these are averages: some TLDs were already in this situation in 2014 and others may only be affected by it after 2017.
The situation is of concern for market players as it means that overall growth, which has already posted a marked slowdown since 2012, will be close to zero in 2016 and probably negative in 2017, reflecting a decrease in the number of domain names filed (excluding nTLDs).
Read the full report here
