Remember April 2020? It brought pandemic, chaos and an unseasonable spike in new domain registrations
- Reference: 1589869929
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/19/april_2020_domain_reg_stats/
- Source link:
In the UK local registry Nominet recorded 132,250 new registrations the month, 15,000 more than in March. It’s an unusual result as Nominet’s last five years of data, lovingly presented [1]here and depicted in our chart below, shows April is usually a pretty quiet month for registrations.
In Australia, the auDA [2]recorded 48,754 new names created, making it “the biggest month for new domain name creations we’ve seen in a while” according to a post from the registrar.
auDA also noticed that the overall number of .au domains fell, but has a pandemic-free explanation for that in the form of “a lower renewal rate for names that were registered in March/April last year during promotions from registrars.”
[3]
New UK domain name registrations, Jan-April, 2016-2020.
Source: Nominet. Click to enlarge
Nominet also spotted a drop in April, to 9,468,306 .uk domains, down 23,000 from the previous month after a ten-thousand-domain climb between February and March.
Verisign, which drives the .com domain, doesn’t offer contemporary registration data.
The UK registry didn’t interpret its data. The Register will have a crack at it: folks who’ve been laid off have decided to have a crack at online business, creating a spike in registrations. On the flipside, some businesses may have decided to let go of domains they’re not using, or lack the people to renew them, or have just – gulp – stopped caring for whatever reason. ®
[1] https://www.nominet.uk/news/reports-statistics/
[2] https://www.auda.org.au/news/au-registry-reports-april-2020-now-available/
[3] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/05/19/new_uk_domain_name_registrations_jan_april_2016_2020.png
Possible explanations:
Sudden appearance of dozens of domains peddling Covid-19-related snake oil products?
Sudden appearance of typosquatting domains phishing for newbie remote users not yet used to online procedures?
Namesco demon changeover
Namesco's demon email users will have been registering .uk and .co.uk domains in the scramble before the 29 May deadline.
Although El Reg announced the deadline has been extended to September - Namesco have not said anything to their users. After buying my new domain - my "DEMON" support ticket took a while to reach Stage 1. It has since been stalled way beyond the "3 days" or "within the week" promise for Stage 2 dual running. Even updating my support ticket about "when Stage 2?" has elicited no response in over a week.
Now sitting on my hands in the expectation that Namesco are finding the workload challenging - and don't need "how's it going?" requests every five minutes.
At the moment I am Keeping Calm and Carrying On - trusting that the El Reg announcement was correct and that there will now be oodles of time to change the 80+ uses of my email addresses to my new domain. If they actually keep to the 29 May then I'm b******d.
I'm not seeing it
"It’s an unusual result as Nominet’s last five years of data, lovingly presented here and depicted in our chart below, shows April is usually a pretty quiet month for registrations."
That data shows that in the last five years April has been the busiest month in two and the lowest in another two. March has exactly the same record. January is consistently in second but only first once, while Feb has been mostly third and never first. March and April seem a bit more erratic than Jan and Feb, but there doesn't seem to be any particularly meaningful trend visible, and certainly nothing to say that April is usually quiet. This year doesn't seem unusual at all, it's almost identical to 2018.