.Berlin in free domain giveaways — .XYZ 1-ups

.Berlin more than doubles it registrations overnight. .XYZ calls.

Starting yesterday, certain registrars started offering free .Berlin domain names to clients in a promotion that will run through the end of the work week.

I posed the question if this promotion would enable .Berlin to overtake .xyz at the top of the top level domain charts.

Following one day it would seem the answer could be yes. But I forgot to consider another factor: .xyz could rev up its own free domain engine.

.Berlin more than doubled its zone file yesterday, adding 67,000 registrations to hit 116,000.

.XYZ, which had been adding a relatively modest number (compared to this) of freebies each day, revved up its engine to add 29,000 domains. That gives it 144,000 domains, still besting .Berlin.

Poor .club. It’s doing things the old fashioned way…charging people for legitimate domain registrations. The domain slipped to third place on 476 domains.