10 Years Of Domain Drops – 142 Million Deleted Domains

Over the past ten years or so, the HosterStats.com databases have generated very large lists of dropped domain names. Many of these domains were dropped at the end of the DotCom Bubble and some were tasted and dropped. Others still were dropped through natural attrition. The .com list of dropped domains is over 105.6 Million domains. The .net list is just over 14.8 million domains. The .org list is 9 million domains. The .biz list is 2.2 million and .info is 9.75 million. The more recent TLDs are not immune and both have just gone through their first Landrush anniversary (otherwise known as the Junk Dump where the domains that couldn’t be flipped or monetised are dropped). The .mobi list is 793K and the .asia list is just under 124K. That’s about 142 Million dropped domains. The number of active domains in these gTLDs is just over 123 million.


.com: 105,667,900
.net: 14,828,945
.org: 9,007,188
.biz: 2,217,178
.info: 9,748,369
.mobi: 793,361
.asia: 123,895

Total: 142,387,106


A few of these domains are domains that are not in the zone files for various reasons (pending delete, owners removing nameservers etc) but most of them are dropped domain names. The domain market is a continually changing one with new domains being registered and old domains being dropped each day. The question now is whether to develop a dropped domain search with this data or market it as a separate product.