Afnic : The New Top Level Domain Names Are Shaking The Main Established Registrars

Afnic, the company behind .FR extension, released the September 2014 edition of the Afnic Industry Report on Domain Names. The report showed that some of the main registrars are not part of the nTLD “Top 10”.

You can read the announcement after the jump:

“The September 2014 edition of the Afnic Industry Report on Domain Names, shows that some of the main registrars are not part of the nTLD « Top 10 »

The Afnic Industry Report on Domain Names provides the key figures and trends related to the global domain name market.

The September 2014 issue focuses on the representativeness of some of the main registrars in the newgTLD “Top 10” and the efficiency of some of the other registrars of lesser size on these new markets.

Four of the first registrars in the world are not part of the nTLD « Top 10 ». More agile challengers are taking advantage of this situation. Overview.

Initiated in January 2014, the commercial launch of the New Top-Level Domains (nTLD) has been greeted with mitigated warmth by market players. This study focuses on the top 10 registrars worldwide to assess how they are positioned with respect to the new TLDs. By contrast, it seemed interesting to note some of the factors that have allowed four “challengers” to move up into the “TOP 10” on new TLDs.

Our data are based on ICANN reports as at 30/04/14 and Ntldstats.com statistics as at 31/08/14.

The indicator on which our assessment is based is calculated by taking the ratio between the market share of a registrar on the new TLDs and its market share in generic TLDs (.com, .net .org, etc.,) created before 2013.

In this way:

    a registrar whose market share in the “traditional” gTLDs is 5%, while its market share in nTLDs is 10%, has a ratio equal to 2;
    Conversely, a registrar whose market share in the “traditional” gTLDs is 10%, while its market share in nTLDs is 5%, has a ratio equal to 0.5.

A ratio greater than 1 means that the registrar’s market share is higher in nTLDs than in traditional gTLDs. The ratio therefore reflects the level of the registrar’s commitment to the new TLDs, either by the means employed (sales drives, promotional campaigns, etc.) or by the success with its resellers and customers in the TLDs it has chosen to market. Here we measure both the level of commitment and of success, which for simplicity’s sake we shall refer to as “positioning”.

The study identifies four categories:

    Ratio less than 0.5: weak positioning
    Ratio between 0.5 and 1: moderate positioning, with no emphasis on nTLDs
    Ratio between 1 and 2: strong positioning, with an emphasis on nTLDs”

You can see the entire report here.