April 2020 Domain Industry Report

Starting this month, we are beginning to publish a monthly domain industry report. This report includes monthly top keywords, top extensions, top countries, top registrars and more.

The last two months were interesting times for all over the world. The coronavirus pandemic has become one of the biggest global crises we see. Nevertheless, the domain industry seems not much affected by looking at the number of domain registrations and sales in comparison to the previous months.

In April 2020, more than 5.16 million domain names were registered. .COM was the top domain extension with 3.28 million domain names (64%). According to our records, 97 of the domain names registered in April 2020 have become in Alexa Top 1 Million List. 

The number of domain registrations in March 2020 was almost the same with April 2020: 5.18 million.

Top Keywords of Domain Registrations

The top 10 keywords of domain names registered in April 2020 are online, shop, home, covid, life, group, health, store, tech and news.

The top keywords are similar to previous month (March 2020) and 7 of them are common. In March 2020; yule and corona were in the top keywords list but this month they are not. Yule is not even in the top 100 list.

The keyword “covid” has been appearing in the monthly top ten keywords list every month since February 2020. Also covid the only keyword that is not included in the all-time top keywords list. Seven of the top 10 keywords of April 2020 are also included in the top 10 keywords of all-time domain registrations. Store and news are not included in the top 10 but they are in the top 50 keywords list of all-time.

Because of the pandemic, keywords related to corona and health are trending such as medical, care, mask, fitness, etc. The popularity of these keywords on domain registrations is showing itself on Google Trends, too.

*We exclude the stopwords such as the, and, my, of, for, in, to, etc, from the list in all our domain industry reports.

Top Extensions

.COM is by far the most popular domain extension in April 2020, as always. 64% of registered domain names in April 2020 were .COM. That means every day more than 110 thousand .com domain names were registered.

The only different extension between March 2020 and April 2020 list is .buzz extension. Club extension was at the 10th place in March, and became 11th in April.

All the new generic top-level domains in the top list have registration promos at almost all registrars. Some of these extensions are offered free or as low as $0.99 for the first year.

The top 10 extensions of domain names registered in April 2020 also exist in the top extensions of all registered domains, except the .buzz extension. 

.BIZ extension is at the 10th place on all-time top extensions but was 25th extension in April.

Top Countries

The USA is the top county of domain registrations like other months. All of the countries in April 2020’s list are also in the all-times top countries list except Russia. Russia is the 14th country in the all-times list but has been appearing in the monthly lists in the last several months.

The domain registrations for each country on the list increased by 10% in comparison to the previous month. Only the domain registrations from China decreased by about 40% in April 2020. Also, Hong Kong was in the top 10 list in March but is 21st place in April.

Turkey, Netherlands, and Austria are the other countries with more than 30 thousand domain registrations.

* We used the registrant country data of Whois records in the top countries analysis.

** A few of the popular whois privacy services use addresses in Panama so we excluded Paname from the list.

Top Domain Registrars

1.2 million domain names, 23.8% of registered domain names in April 2020, were registered at GoDaddy. 61.4% of domain names were registered at the top 10 registrars, above.

The fact that Wix, as a website builder, finds a place in the list indicates that the domain names registered there will be used as websites. That means that more people or small companies have started doing online business during the pandemic.

5 of the top 10 domain registrars of April 2020 are also in the all-time top 10 domain registrars.

Expiry Date Statistics

More than 92% of the registered domain names in April 2020 are registered for 1 year. This is not something surprising. The interesting thing is that 5-years registrations and 10-years registrations are high in comparison to other multiple year registrations. This statistic was almost the same in the previous month.

10% of the registration of COM, NET, and ORG extensions are made for more than 1 year. For .info, this rate is about 5%, but if we look at the new generic top-level domains, we see that %97 to %100 of the registrations are made for one year.

We, statistically, know that more than 50% of the 1-year registered domain names won’t be renewed next year and will be deleted. This deletion rate is higher on the new gTLDs.

Top Domain Sales

In April 2020, there were 11 domain sales above $50,000 and 102 domain sales above $10,000. The 9 of the sales above $50,000 are .com and others are .de and .cc. The $51,000 787.cc sale is the 3rd most expensive .cc domain sales ever.

There were 21 domain sales above $50,000 and 96 domain sales above $10,000 in March 2020.

For more details: Top Domain Sales of April 2020

What Domain Industry Was Talking About Last Month?

• ICANN rejected .org sale to a private equity company: ICANN decided to withhold consent on the controversial sale of the .org registry PIR to private equity company Ethos Capital. The $1.135 billion deal was delayed by ICANN before. Parties involved in the deal released statements to announce their disappointments after the decision.

• GoDaddy, the largest domain registrar in the world, will make all Whois records private with no cost for customers. Most of the top registrars are already providing Whois privacy service for free for years.

• .DE registrations hit 16.3 million at the end of 2019. 15 million of them registered to people and companies in Germany. 

• GoDaddy acquired Neustar, the registry of .biz and .us domain extensions.

• Facebook and Instagram defensively registered hundreds of coronavirus-related domain names.

Last month, we started to publish detailed analysis about domain extensions on Dofo Blog and the first one was The King of Domain Extensions: .COM. We also published articles about .NET, and .ORG.

We will continue to publish monthly domain industry reports next month.  (Note: All the data in this report was taken from Dofo. We didn’t include the country code domains in this analysis because of the lack of accuracy.)

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