Lockdown-driven gains retained
It was a good summer... for the domain name market, at least
From late March 2020, demand for domain names rose sharply in the Netherlands. Nearly a million new .nl domain names were registered in the space of a year. And 2020's net growth was three times that seen in 2019. Since the upturn started, the big question concerning the market has been what would happen to all the new domain names and websites when lockdown ends. Would enterprises drift back to their old offline business models? With data for the year to August now in, we can say that there's no sign of that happening yet.
Registration peak in the first half of 2021
For the first six months of 2021, the Netherlands was in lockdown. Unsurprisingly, that led to even more new registrations, because it was much easier to start a business online than offline. Since the first lockdown, all start-ups have been saying they intend to operate at least partly online, and registration numbers have reflected that. In the first half of the year, the .nl zone grew by 100,000 domain names.
Cancellations in decline since March 2020
Another, perhaps more striking observation is that the domain names and websites that came out of the spring 2020 upturn didn't fall out of use a year later. Registration and hosting contracts are often for a year. Many people therefore expected a cancellation surge twelve months on from last year's registration surge. But that didn't materialise. In fact, the number of cancellations has been declining since its peak in March 2020, and we've seen net growth in the .nl domain. So it seems that the businesses that turned to the internet in the first lockdown have generally renewed their contracts this year. The trends in new registrations and cancellations are shown in the following graph.
Growth plateaus over the summer
Another period that people in the domain name industry are wary of is the summer holiday period, when there's usually a lull in activity. When people are on the beach, they aren't registering domain names. There was reason to fear that this year's lull would be more pronounced, with lockdown largely coming to an end. However, the data shows no evidence of a major summer downturn. Registration volumes held up well. That probably had a lot to do with the poor weather literally dampening the 'beach effect'. Cancellation rates were also fairly normal.
More than a brief spike, but prospects uncertain
It seems, then, that the accelerated digitisation driven by lockdown wasn't a temporary phenomenon. Nevertheless, the long-term implications for the size of the .nl zone are modest. With 6.2 million domain names, the market is largely saturated. We don't therefore anticipate substantial further growth, certainly not if the economic climate deteriorates.
