Afnic, the company behind .FR extension, has just published its monthly Industry Report on domian names.
You can read the announcement after the jump :"In our Domain Name Industry Report for April 2015 we studied the major trends in the domain name market in 2014. It seemed interesting to try to extend these trends for "Legacy gTLDs" or traditional generic TLDs such as .biz, .com, .info etc., and ccTLDs corresponding to territories such as the .de (Germany), .fr (France), and .uk (United Kingdom)…For the purposes of this study, we relied on ICANN reports for Legacy gTLDs and ccTLDs, and on the statistics of members of the Council of European National Top Level Domain Registries (CENTR) with more than 50,000 domain names in stock. Since the new TLDs introduced to the market in 2014 are still something of a "new development" we have not included them in this edition of the Afnic Domain Name Industry Report, but it is quite obvious that they will have to be included in the future.The coming consolidation cannot be considered a surprise. In a period of high growth such as that experienced by the domain name market up until 2012, while the Retention Rates (or Maintenance Rate) remain constant, the volume of deletions in principle increases in step with the stock, offset by one year. For this reason, what we are discussing here is only the visual translation of a combination of the "mechanical" phenomenon with the overall slowdown in the momentum of domain name creations in the TLDs concerned.The average Retention Rate for Legacy TLDs was stable at 76.4% in 2014, as it was in 2013. The problem facing Legacy TLDs, therefore, is caused less by the abnormal growth in deletions, than by the downturn of the momentum of creations. If we measure the ratio between the number of creations and the stock at the end of the period, the Create Rate increased from 26.3% to 25.4% in 2014, and has been continuously declining since its peak of 30.4% in 2010.For ccTLDs, the average Retention Rate (or Maintenance Rate) was 82.8% in 2014 against 81.4% in 2013, indicating a more controlled trend of deletions than for Legacy TLDs. The Create Rate on the other hand dropped from 22.3% to 19.0%, reflecting the same problem in creations as that experienced by Legacy TLDs.The change in the ratio of deletions / creations shown in Figure 2 demonstrates that the degradation of the Deletions / Creations ratio can be observed from 2012, two years before the introduction of nTLDs onto the market. If these "newcomers" may inevitably be the cause of "disposals" when domain names are created or renewed, henceforth they must only be considered as a factor liable to accentuate a trend that was already active when they first appeared.The projections shown are on the basis of "all other things being equal". Many factors may intervene by 2017 that influence changes in creations as well as deletions. The impact of nTLDs is probably the factor most present in people’s minds, but other issues should be recalled such as the health of the global economy, the development of uses promoting domain names or limiting their scope and the strategies of the major players (search engines, etc.), all of which may influence the domain name market.The 2017 deadline is not a fate carved in stone. It can be postponed, or brought closer, by the actions of market participants as well as by exogenous events. But it should probably not be considered a sign of the market’s poor health. It is logical and no doubt fairly healthy for a period of explosion like that of the decade 2004 – 2014 to be followed by a slower phase during which the domain names filed without any real utility are abandoned by their holders before being taken up by others.All in all, it is certainly better to be a medium-sized TLD, but whose domain names are frequently used – ensuring a high renewal rate in the future – than a TLD that has focused its development on a volume strategy, but which now has to face the volatility inherent to that kind of strategy. It is those TLDs that have most to fear from the increased competition and consolidation that for some of them has already begun."
