The Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries (CENTR) has released its Global TLD Report for the second half of 2022. The report covers the performance of various TLDs across the borders till the month of July.
The report shows a leveling of domain sales figures to the pre-pandemic levels. Domain sales marked an up from 2021 Q4 to 2022 Q4. However, the boom witnessed during the pandemic has slowed down since 2022 Q1.
This can be viewed in a better way by comparing the mean and average sales figures of different TLDs. In the first 6 months leading up to July 2022, the median growth had been 2%, which is less than the average of the same time period. This implies that the growth across the period had been fluctuating leading to a higher average, but on most months the growth was close to 2%. The renewal rates also followed the same trend, with the median renewal ratio falling behind the average figures.
Although if you compare the figures of 2022 to 2020 and 2021, the graph might appear as going down. But when compared to pre 2020 figures, the figures are approaching the same level before the bump in 2020 and 2021. A lot of the credit to this fluctuation accords to the special scenario that the pandemic and lockdowns induced.
The figures also produced very different trajectories for the ccTLDs and gTLDs. Error rate is a figure that shows how many domains actually resolved to a working platform. While the error rate for ccTLDs has been around 2%, the same for gTLDs has been marked at 10%!
So, why is the error rate so high for gTLDs? The reason being the huge pressure on gTLDs for resale. Popular gTLDs like .com, .net and .org aren’t bereft of these high error rates either. gTLDs have on the other hand fared well in this regard. The reason for this is two fold.
The first being that for a domain investor gTLDs produce a more lucrative investment. As the clients for these domain names could be from any corner of the world regardless of their nationality. ccTLD domains, reduce the resale market scope substantially and are hence most often outside investor’s primary focus. Another reason adding to the skewing figures is the acceptability that ccTLDs have. Unless you have an ambition of taking your business to the global level, ccTLDs appear far more relevant to gTLDs. ccTLDs add a layer of nationalistic branding that plays fairly well on a medium sized enterprise operating locally.
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