Alibaba, Endurance over Web.com — Namecheap overtakes

Shakeup on the overall leaderboard.

ICANN has published the latest official data from Verisign (NASDAQ: VRSN) regarding the .com namespace. This registrar-by-registrar note covers June 2020.

There are a few key takeaways:

1. As I predicted last month, Namecheap has overtaken Alibaba to become the fifth-largest .com registrar. It now has over 6 million .com domains under management. In June, it topped Tucows for the #2 spot on monthly .com adds. Namecheap was previously a reseller on Tucows’ Enom platform.

2. Web.com is experiencing a serious collapse in fresh registrations while other registrars are seeing growth. Historically, it was regularly in the top 10 for monthly .com registrations, garnering 60,000+ registrations per month. In June it had only 36,000 fresh .com registrations, and only 29,000 if you exclude registrations from its Dreamscape buyout. While it still has a huge base of .com domains, it slipped to #4 on the total .com registration base charts.

3. Wix.com continues its upward climb. The firm is getting a boost from people shifting their businesses online during the pandemic and it is increasing ad spend to take advantage of the opportunity. Clients registered another 100k+ .com domains in June, and the firm is nearing 1 million .com domains under management.

Here’s how registrars did in terms of fresh .com registrations in June:

1. GoDaddy.com* (NYSE: GDDY) 1,019,809 (893,819 in May)
2. Namecheap Inc. 276,463  (221,681)
3. Tucows** (NASDAQ:TCX) 261,936 (241,523)
4. Endurance+ (NASDAQ: EIGI) 198,274 (185,996)
5. Alibaba (HiChina) 160,422 (129,520)
6. Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL) 159,637 (146,768)
7. Wix (NASDAQ: WIX) 118,685 (104,064)
8. United Internet^ 78,001 (74,587)
9. NameSilo 58,967 (53,893)
10. Bizcn.com 49,431 (n/a)

Here’s the leaderboard of the top registrars in terms of total .com registrations under management as of the end of June 2020.

1. GoDaddy* 53,921,563 (53,787,318 in May)
2. Tucows** 12,911,196 (12,858,166)
3. Endurance+ 7,054,410 (7,011,577)
4. Web.com++ 7,036,119 (7,054,625)
5. Namecheap 6,001,568 (5,843,286)
6. Alibaba 5,877,037 (5,876,504)
7. United Internet^ 5,550,769 (5,543,211)
8. Google 3,653,632 (3,566,580)
9. Xin Net Technology Corporation 3,087,400 (3,391,386)
10. GMO 2,270,872 (2,305,575)

Many domain firms have multiple accreditations and I’ve tried to capture the largest ones. See the notes below.

* Includes GoDaddy, Wild West Domains, Uniregistry and 123 Reg
** Includes Tucows, Enom, Ascio and EPAG
+ Includes PDR, Domain.com, FastDomain and Bigrock. There are other Endurance registrars, but these are the biggest.
++ Includes Network Solutions, Register.com, and Crazy Domains/Dreamscape
^ Includes 1&1, PSI, Cronon, United-Domains, Arsys and world4you