Posts tagged "aftermarket"

2 posts found.

September 28, 2026 27 min read

Two in Three Resolving .xyz Names Are Listed for Sale: The Machine-Generated Registration Waves Behind 2026's Surge

.xyz accounted for 98% of the domain market's net growth in August 2026, and nobody said why. Our Newly Observed Hostnames feed saw 3.27 million new .xyz names between June and September, 2.7 million more than the spring pace. In our September sample, 84% came through one Japanese registrar, and almost all of those went straight to Afternic, GoDaddy's domain marketplace. They were generated by gluing a keyword such as gpu, taxi or manga to dictionary words. The same pattern ran in 2025, and the August 2025 batch was 88% deleted a year later. Two in three resolving .xyz names now point at an Afternic for-sale page. The flood also blunts a common security signal: in every wave month, a new .xyz name was less likely than a new name elsewhere to be reported for phishing. For registries, registrars, domain investors, security teams and anyone who uses domain counts as a signal.

July 23, 2026 22 min read

Who Moves the World's DNS: 15 Months of Delegation Flux, a One-Month Million-Domain Migration, and the Nameservers That Outlive Their Owners

We followed the NS delegation of every apex domain across nine full crawls, April 2025 - July 2026 (404 million apexes). 61% of the web kept the exact same nameservers for fifteen months; operator switching runs at 2.3% a month; and the biggest moves were corporate re-plumbs - GoDaddy consolidating 2.1 million NameFind domains onto Afternic, Namecheap shifting 1.1 million parked names to an undocumented platform in one month. Meanwhile 339,000 domains still delegate to the retired Dan.com. For DNS operators, security teams, and Internet measurement researchers.