July 02, 2026
18 min read
We followed every one of the 181.1 million domains that resolved in April 2023 across 26 DNS snapshots to June 2026, and did the same for a 246.8-million-domain 2025 cohort. The resolving web loses 13-15% of itself every year — a half-life of roughly five years — but the deaths are wildly unequal: Freenom's five TLDs went 99% extinct in the largest die-off ever recorded in the DNS, the cheap-promo gTLDs lose up to 95% of their web in three years, and Germany's .de keeps 84% alive. For registrars, investors, security teams, and anyone who links to anything.
April 30, 2026
24 min read
We compared the master DomainsProject corpus (3.12 billion unique hostnames ever observed) against the 17 April 2026 active crawl (1.47 billion currently resolving) and found that 52.9% of the observable web no longer answers the DNS. .com alone holds 808 million dead hostnames; the five Freenom-managed ccTLDs (.tk, .ml, .ga, .cf, .gq) are 99% extinct; the new-gTLD program churns at 75% dead; and a small spine of restrictive ccTLDs — .jp, .it, .de, .nl — sits below 30%.
March 25, 2026
19 min read
We parsed 50.6 million hostnames in the .xyz namespace and found 13.3 million direct registrations generating 37.6 million subdomains. .xyz is the largest new gTLD on Earth and the 4th-largest gTLD overall — ahead of the UK's .uk and level with Brazil's .br. But a fresh DNS pass complicates the 'live infrastructure' story: only 42% of .xyz roots still resolve. The real .xyz is a barbell — a genuine developer and crypto core wrapped in a vast promotional-churn tail. Refreshed June 2026 with first-party resolution data.
March 20, 2026
22 min read
We analyzed 3.18 billion observed hostnames across 1,511 TLDs to measure .com's dominance — 1.36 billion hostnames, 42.7% of the namespace, one registry operator, zero competition. But only 57.2% of those .com hostnames return a live A record. What a government-granted monopoly means for infrastructure risk, pricing, and the future of the namespace. Refreshed June 2026 with first-party DNS resolution data.