Pinky Brand just published some bold predictions for the number of domain names that will exist in 2016 including registrations from new gTLD’s.
For those that don’t know, Pinky is one of the founders of .mobi, which is “today ranked in the top 30 off the roughly 268 existing TLDs worldwide with nearly 1.1 million active domains in the zone.”
“So what kind of market share can we expect by the end of—say 2016—from the new gTLDs? What kind of monthly ‘net new create’ numbers are needed for a single new gTLD to achieve a particular number by the end of 2016, assuming they can get 36 months of selling time by launching by January 2014? No one really knows, but I’ll take an educated stab at it.”
“If you take the 15 sponsored TLDs that have been added since 2001 (legacy ‘new TLDs’ if you will) and count their total number of registrations, they amount to less than 5% of the current total estimated number of 252 million names registered across 268 TLDs. ”
“The vast majority of that 5% is with .info, .biz and .mobi. I won’t dive in here as to their relevance or other issues for not grabbing a larger market share, just stating numerical facts.”
“Take away the withdrawn applications and contention sets and there is potential for an estimated 1,112 new gTLDs.
“Take away the IDNs, the dotBrands and ‘closed’ generics and you are left with about 256 potential ‘open generic’ new gTLDs in the marketplace, assuming contentions, objections and other delay and/or death mechanisms are resolved—but don’t count on that.”
So here’s where I think we might be at the end of 2016.
“I believe .com and legacy gTLD zone files will experience moderate but continually slowing annual growth, ending with 129.5M and 41.5M registrations respectively. ccTLDs will continue their fast annual growth, ending with 163.8M registrations.:
“But wait, what about the new gTLDs? Well, if applicants, the channel, and the industry as a whole do a bang-up job educating, marketing and selling their value props through existing and new channels—essentially hit the ball out of the park—we could see the global market share for new gTLDs in aggregate reach 18% by the end of 2016. I mean they/we/you would have to *kill* it to get to that point. That would be an achievement that means at least three times better performance in 3 years than what the legacy sponsored TLDs have achieved in the past 12 years.”
“That would mean an additional 73.6M new registrations in the marketplace—bringing us to a total of 408.5M names in all TLDs at the end of 2016.”
I believe the vast majority of the growth in global registration will come from open generics, as in 94% of that 18% market share.…
