Getting to Know the DNIB.com Dashboards: gTLD Registration and Renewal Trends

The new DNIB.com website expands the view beyond the domain name base for exploring Domain Name System (DNS) industry trends. The number of domain names in a top-level domain (TLD) base fluctuates over time, as new registrations come in and existing registrations delete out. Metrics quantifying these two activities can offer insight on the dynamics impacting domain name base changes.

The gTLD Registration and Renewal Trends dashboard has three different metrics to select from in the first drop-down menu: Renewal Percentage, Renewals and New Registrations. For each of these metrics, you can use the next two drop-down menus to control the dates you’re viewing. You can set an end date to serve as the reference point for all fixed and calculated metrics and change the level of detail – monthly, quarterly or annually – for your customized trend view. When comparisons are presented, the “Comparison Type” drop-down allows you to choose between “Year-over-Year” or the “Last 3 Years” of data.

After selecting one of the three metrics and customizing your view, you can quickly see a high-level trend for all generic TLDs (gTLDs) since 2014, alongside a breakdown for three TLD groups based on your selected end date. If you don’t choose one of your own, the end date will default to the most recent reporting period. Below the two summary charts, the dashboard lists individual metric details for each TLD in a scrollable table. This table can be filtered to focus on a specific TLD group or a single TLD. In the overall trends and detail table, a summary of how the selected metric has changed over the comparison period is displayed for easy trend identification.

Now, let’s dive into each of the metric options in the gTLD Registration and Renewal Trends Dashboard:

Renewal Percentage The percentage of domain names renewed during the selected time period. For most TLDs, renewal percentage is calculated based on changes to zone files over time, with a simplifying assumption that all domain names expire each year. Multi-year TLD registrations may cause the renewal percentage presented in the DNIB.com dashboards to be very slightly overstated. But .com/.net metrics use registry-specific data that factors in term length, so renewal percentages are fully accurate for those two TLDs.

Renewals The number of domain names in a selected period that were renewed. Setting the granularity selector to “Year” will give you a view of how many renewals each TLD group or TLD saw over the past few years. You may notice a few odd trends as you move to a finer granularity in the renewal metric. For TLDs that pre-date our routine daily zone file aggregation, the first zone file used is the estimated “create date” for all domain names that existed before that date. This only impacts a few TLDs, but creates regular spikes of renewing domain names every year when that anniversary comes around.

New Registrations The number of domain names added to the domain name base of a TLD during a selected period. Like the renewal statistics, these metrics are derived by comparing zone files.

Across this entire dashboard, don’t forget to mouse over the various chart points for additional details that can help explain trends or provide a summary of all three metrics for comparison.

Note: This dashboard does not include ccTLDs, as the metrics here are projected from comparing daily zone files and not all ccTLDs uniformly report the needed data. For DNIB.com’s detailed ccTLD data, visit the ccTLD Geographic Trends section of our Global Domain Base Trends dashboard.

DNIB.com is a website that will continue to evolve and I’ll be sharing how I use this and similar datasets to study trends in the domain name industry.