According to NtldStats.com, a website that tracks new domain extensions, over 70% of new domains that have been registered are now parked. That equals over 18 million domain names out of the 25 million that NtldStats says are currently registered.
The 18 million new domains that are parked are notable. Why? The rate of new domains being parked has been going up at a much faster rate than usual.
On October 25th there were about 13 million estimated new domains that were parked according to NtdlStats. In roughly 3 weeks that number has increased by almost 5 million domains. This means per week there have been 1.5+ million parked domains added… and counting. That is a large jump in a short period of time and something that should be concerning to new domain registries, domain investors, and people and businesses uses new domain extensions.
NtldStats basically considers the “Parking” section to show domains that are registered but not in use. There could be a number of reasons for a domain to be considered parked by NtldStats. Parking domain name servers, parking IP address, domains with no DNS records, domains with no name servers, etc.
What's odd to me is that back in July of this year there was a similar jump in parked new domains. The new domains that were parked jump from roughly 12 – 13 million up to 16 – 17 million parked domain names. It came down a couple months ago and then suddenly jumped back up again.
Why this has happened I don't know. Whatever the reasons it is definitely not a good sign for new domain extensions. While some new gTLD advocates might point to the 7 million new domains that are not parked, that isn't a good number either. Most of those 7 million domains in my opinion are used for spamming.
I interview an IT manager at a company that said he blocked ALL new domains from the company's email. Why? They only got spam.
Eli the Computer Guy also tells his great story of how used a .INFO domain, that .INFO domains never caught on, and nobody undestands them. Nobody else has pointed this out but several years ago .INFO has just under 8 million domains registered. Today that number stands at 5.4 million and continues to drop. New domains will follow a similar path.
Even if we looked at the supposedly strong new domain extensions, same percentage is parked. What do I mean by “strong”? Those new domain company's that have NOT heavily discounted first year registrations and done focused marketing. For instance .CLUB, considered the poster child by some for new domains, has 73% parked domains. That's 630,000 parked .CLUB domains out of 836,000 registered.
None of this looks good when the claim is these new gTLDs are for businesses to use because of a dearth of .COM availability. Screw new domains, bottom line… they are NOT working.
What are your thoughts about 70% of new domains being parked? Do you think that going up to 18 million parked domains in a short period of time is odd? Will parking new domains become more popular? Will the numbers go even higher?
