How many new domain names will the explosion in gTLDs really produce?

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a nonprofit body that oversees the structure of the Internet, is about to multiply number of top level domain names (TLDs) by a factor of ten. Will that mean that there will be ten times more domain names in use? Do we really need that many?

Today the world lives with 20+ generic top-level domains (gTLDs), like that popular ones: .com, .net, .org, and .info, and less known ones: .aero, .coop, .jobs, or .museum. On top of that there are 200+ two character country codes (ccTLDs) for all possible states, islands and atolls, for instance .tv for Tuvalu. Recently ICANN has added a dozen of Internationalised TLDs (IDNs), those in non-Latin scripts.

In 28 years of their existence, domain names grew from a dozen back in 1985 to 250 million of them we have right now. This is an impressive cumulative annual growth rate of 80% that will make any other industry envy. Though if we narrow the analysed time window to the last three years, this growth slowed down to 10% and is now represented by a single digit around 5%. It still corresponds to nearly 10 million new domain names added every year. Despite so many millions of domain names in existence not all of them are really used. About a third are either “parked” as a single page or do not resolve at all.

Now that ICANN wants to have 1000+ new TLDs, how will it affect the status quo? Of course, not all of the applications will be approved and many of those granted will be brand-specific, e.g., .amazon or .google . Nevertheless, some 300 or more of them shall be quite generic and open, and new kids on the block such as .hotel, .shop, .web, .etc will start to compete with the old ones. With high probability we can say that the domain name base shall double or triple over the coming five years.