What happened in December, the one year anniversary of the Chinese investment bananza.

ICANN just published data from Verisign about .com activity in December.

This was the one year anniversary of lots of Chinese speculative registrations, and the deletions were massive.

eName had 794,258 domains delete. HiChina saw 532,231 names delete. 22net had 125,766 deletions.

These numbers were significantly higher than November for eName and HiChina, but lower for 22net.

Now, let’s look at how the registrars fared with new registrations and transfers in December:

Here are the top 5 registrars in November in terms of new .com registrations:

1. GoDaddy* 773,845
2. Rightside** 202,914
3. PublicDomainRegistry 137,593
4. HiChina 130,337
5. Tucows 118,476

Here are the top five registrars (open to the public) for net inbound transfers:

1. HiChina +29,012
2. 123 Reg +9,481
3. Epik +9,112
4. MAFF +6,983
5. Google +6,836

On the flip side, these five registrars saw the biggest net outflow of .com domain names due to transfers:

1. Tucows -27,143
2. eName -11,645
3. Web.com*** -8,450
4. PDR -7,850
5. Xin Net -7,076

Note that GoDaddy does not end up on the list of top losers of transfers, yet Tucows is #1. I suspect this has a lot to do with Tucows deal to sell expired domain inventory through GoDaddy. Whenever GoDaddy sells one of Tucows’ domains, the domain is transferred from Tucows to GoDaddy.

*Includes GoDaddy and Wild West Domains **This is prior to Tucows’ acquisition of eNom and includes eNom and Name.com *** Includes Network Solutions and Register.com, but not drop catching registrars.