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
Result of more extension choices ?
No. The trend has been ongoing for a few years now.
More likely tied to excessive use of domain names toward search traffic attraction. With content crawlers taking steps against such content and some users focusing on social instead of search, this was likely unavoidable.
There’s an economic angle to it as well, Rubens,
Many small site owners who have registered domains across the legacy TLDs (C/N/O/B/I) are dropping their non-core registrations in BIZ, INFO and MOBI. The there is also a ccTLD effect where registrants are dropping their non-core registrations across legacy gTLDs and focusing on their ccTLD as their primary brand (where they are marketing to the local country market) and just retaining their .COM version. For many of these small businesses, it is just not viable to retain their registrations across COM/NET/ORG/BIZ/INFO as well as their ccTLD registration. And there’s the big problem of which a lot of the industry seems to be unaware. The one year anniversary renewal rates for some gTLDs are getting lower.
My two cents are here and I anticipate consolidation to begin late next year per earlier projections:
http://dotdotblog.com/domain-name-industry-forecast-2015-the-year-ahead/
If you think it is going to happen late next year, then that is about five years too late. The trends have been evident for a few years now but the problem is that very few people were doing any analysis on these trends. With the focus on .COM, the rise of the ccTLDs went largely unnoticed because most domainers were focused on .COM and they don’t read much on the statistics of the domain name market. The set of registered domain names changes daily, weekly, monthly and yearly. Most domain names that are registered today will not be developed into working websites. Their owners might not even use them for e-mail or other services. Many of them will not be renewed. And this doesn’t even begin to address the dangerous effect of discounting on TLDs.
Dangerous ? No one in the world cares except domainers and registries. No one else cares if biz loses 500,000 registrations.
It is hitting .COM TLD.
It all boils down to the inability of many domain owners to keep their domains.