Verisign: 3% of fresh TLD registrations contain business websites

Parked domains make up the bulk of fresh TLD registrations.

Verisign analyzed registrations of fresh top level domain names to determine how second level registrations under these fresh domain names are being used.

The analysis determined that just 3% of domains registered so far are being used for a “business website” and the majority of domains are parked:

The breakdown is much more nuanced than what the firm presents regarding its own TLDs, .net and .com. When it decides to note the numbers, the firm splits .com/.net into three buckets: one page websites, multiple page website and no websites. The breakdown amongst these groups is typically around 20%/65%/15%. (I’ve asked Verisign if it will run the same analysis it ran for fresh TLDs for .com.)

Verisign provides a number of caveats and points out outliers in the data. For example, the parked page percentage would be much lower if Web.com wasn’t registering and parking .xyz domain names on behalf of its clients.

It’s worth noting that every fresh top level domain name registration is less than 8 months old. I suspect the numbers for .com domains registered less than 8 months are even more skewed to parked pages than the slash line I noted above.

Verisign is careful not to draw any conclusions from the data, only noting that it’s “early days for fresh gTLDs” and that “this analysis offers an interesting snapshot of the first few months of fresh gTLD general availability.”

Of course, we all know where Verisign stands on fresh TLDs.