In an interesting new study, WhoIsHostingThis.com discovered that only 30% of domains that are registered are kept for more than a year.
The group looked at the behavior of over a million domains on the leading top-level domains (TLDs). And they found that 70% of domains that are registered are dropped within a year. The group found that almost 30% of those dropped domains are then re-registered by other users, while 41% are left to expire.
“We wanted to find out more about domain registration behavior so we commissioned this study of one million domains – it turns out the churn rate for domains is much much higher than I think many would expect” says Richard Kershaw at WhoIsHostingThis.com.
The study looked at registrations across the seven most popular TLDs plus the ccTLD.CN (People’s Republic of China). The domains included .com, .net, .top, .org, .info, .cn, .xyz, and .biz.
Looking at unique domain names registered since 2012. They found that renewal rates vary significantly by TLD with .net, .org, and .info having the highest renewal rates (46.31%, 44.24%, and 34.56%). The lowest renewal rates were for .top with a renewal rate of 22.22%, .biz with a renewal rate of 16.60%, and .cn with a staggering 1.72% renewal rate.
The TLDs with the lowest level of domains left to expire were .com with 43.12%, .org with 28.85%, and .net with 19.28%.
