At Neustar’s domain name base — A look

Firm is counting on fresh TLDs for growth in domain name business, but it’s slow.

Neustar noted earnings yesterday and released updated information on its base of domain names registered.

.Co continues to perform well for the firm, adding $5.2 million revenue in the first quarter. Additionally, the firm has operating agreements with 122 fresh top level domains that have signed agreements with ICANN. 43 are by now in market.

This chart shows how many domain names Neustar is managing, both as the registry operator as well as the backend service provider for others’ TLDs:

The Registry Operator domains are primarily made up of .biz, .us and .co. You’ll notice a big switch from Q1 2014 to Q2 2014. This is when the .co domains moved from backend provider to registry operator.

.Biz is easy to track since the firm has to note numbers to ICANN. .Biz lost regarding a quarter million domains last year, which is probably why the number fell during the year.

The backend provider numbers are a bit harder to reconcile. Neustar runs the backend for .tel. I’m not sure where the rest of the domains early last year are from, as other TLDs it handles seem to be modest. But much of the growth since Q2 2014 has been from fresh TLDs. Neustar runs the backend for .Club, which now has over 200,000 registrations. It also has .Science, which is also over 200,000 (although much of that growth came subsequent to the end of Q1). .NYC is also proving to be a winner for Neustar; it’s not clear which line item that’s under.

nTLDStats calculates that Neustar is powering 580,000 fresh top level domain names.