.cn Domain Drop Continues – .uk May Overtake .cn

The Chinese .cn ccTLD has lost more domains and has 8,844,196 domains registered as of March 2010. This is a drop of 690,924 domains since February. However the January 2010 to February 2010 drop was 2,744,961 domains. This may indicate that the bulk of the domains being dropped were those from the low cost domain offer running at the time of the 2008 Olympics. The rate of deletions is slowing but it is possible that the United Kingdom’s .uk ccTLD (8,413,958 domains as of the end of March 2010) will over take the .cn ccTLD to be the second largest ccTLD registry within the next few months.

The 2010 ccTLD and gTLD Domain Name Counts on HosterStats.com show a changing market. A few years ago the main driver of domain registrations was PPC advertising. Development now seems to be playing a far more important role. The fact that ICANN, after a lot of encouragement, finally curtailed the domain name tasting problem also helped.