DropCatch Added 300 Registrars. It Now Holds 45 Percent of All ICANN Accreditations.

The number of ICANN-accredited registrars is one of the figures the hosting and domain industry quotes most often, and it has been losing meaning with every DropCatch batch. ICANN has recently approved 300 new Registrar Accreditation Agreements for shell companies named DropCatch.com 1546 LLC through DropCatch.com 1845 LLC, as Domain Incite reported on September 3. All of them belong to TurnCommerce, the Denver company behind DropCatch.com, NameBright and HugeDomains.

We counted IANA’s registrar ID list again on September 27. It carries 1,501 accreditations with DropCatch in the name, out of 3,321 accredited in total. That is 45.2 percent of every accreditation ICANN has issued and not terminated. Counting everything on the same NameBright endpoint takes it to 1,552, or 46.7 percent, and neither figure has moved since the same list was counted ten days earlier. The 1,501 are TurnCommerce’s by name. The rest share its infrastructure, which is strong evidence of common operation and not a registry of ownership.

None of the 300 was set up as a customer-facing registrar. They exist to open more connections to gTLD registries at the moment an expired domain drops, so that DropCatch’s registration request lands before a competitor’s. That matters to two groups of readers: hosts running their own accredited registrar, who now compete for drops against a fleet a quarter larger than it was, and anyone who quotes the registrar count as a measure of market breadth.

Key facts

• The batch: 300 new accreditations, IANA IDs 4590 to 4889, every one named DropCatch.com and every one pointing at the same NameBright server.
• The share: 1,501 of ICANN’s 3,321 accreditations carry the DropCatch name, 45.2 percent. On its endpoint, 1,552.
• The runner-up: another 519 point at SnapNames, the drop catcher Newfold Digital inherited with Web.com. The two endpoints together carry 62 percent.
• The bill: at ICANN’s fixed fee of USD 4,000 a year, the 1,501 named accreditations cost about USD 6.0 million before variable and transaction fees.

From 452 Registrars in 2014 to 1,501 Today

TurnCommerce has grown its fleet in steps that the trade press has recorded each time. In December 2014 Domain Incite counted at least 452 registrars after a batch of 299, which was then over 31 percent of the 1,456 registrars listed by InterNIC. In October 2015 Domain Name Wire reported another 300, taking the count to 752. In December 2016 Domain Incite reported 500 more, at least 1,252 in total and about 43 percent of all accreditations at the time. It put the ICANN application fees for that batch at $1.75 million and the extra annual running cost at $2 million.

Then the count drifted slightly downward for eight years. In April 2025 Domain Name Wire’s Andrew Allemann counted 1,201 DropCatch registrars and asked whether the company would start shutting some down. His arithmetic ran the other way from this month’s news.

TurnCommerce’s .com portfolio had fallen from 6.0 million names in December 2023 to 5.1 million in December 2024, the average number of domains caught per registrar per month had dropped from 58 to 25, and ICANN’s variable fee pool had risen. He put the overhead at about $18 per caught domain, up from around $8, and wrote that unless the company planned to catch more domains he “wouldn’t be surprised if it deletes some of its accreditations.”

Seventeen months later the company did the opposite. Neither trade report carries a comment from TurnCommerce, whose own site dates the company to 2003 and says nothing about the batch. The record of what it added is ICANN’s and IANA’s.

Why a Drop Catcher Buys Registrars by the Hundred

gTLD registries generally limit how many connections a single registrar may hold open to its registration system and how fast it may send commands over them. When a domain finishes its pending delete period and becomes available, every drop catcher fires create commands at the registry for the same name in the same second. A company with one accreditation has one registrar’s allowance. Each further accreditation it onboards can carry its own, subject to each registry’s rules.

As Domain Incite put it this month, “more registrars means more registry connections and a greater chance to re-registered [sic] expired domain names when they drop.” Domain Incite’s 2014 description was blunter: the shells exist “to control more batches of connections with which to spam gTLD registries with ‘add’ requests when potentially valuable domains expire.”

The tactic is legal and decades old, and it is not unique to TurnCommerce. The 519 registrars behind SnapNames are the same idea at smaller scale. What has changed is the ratio. In 2014, TurnCommerce’s shells were just over 31 percent of all registrars. In 2016 they were 43 percent. Today the ones carrying its name are 45.2 percent.

The second fleet is not built the same way. Alongside the numbered SnapNames companies, the same endpoint carries Register.com, Network Solutions and Domain.com, which are registrars with customers.

The variable side of ICANN’s fee structure is why the fixed count matters to the whole registrar community. ICANN’s fee schedule for the fiscal year that began on July 1 holds the per-registrar variable fee at a pool of $3.8 million, billed at $950,000 a quarter and divided equally among every registrar accredited for a full quarter or with at least one transaction.

Registrars approved it themselves in a ballot that closed on July 10, by 73.10 percent to 0.68 percent with the rest not voting. Registrars with fewer than 350,000 names under management and no more than 200 attempted adds per successful net add are forgiven two-thirds of their share.

Drop-catching shells fire hundreds of failed creates for every name they catch, and Domain Name Wire reported in April 2025, after checking the monthly Verisign files, that DropCatch’s registrars would not qualify for the exemption. A larger fleet therefore carries a larger share of the pool. Transaction fees of $0.20 per surviving add, renew or transfer apply on top.

A Statistic That Counts One Operation 1,501 Times

The headline number is easy to misuse. Neither ICANN’s accredited registrar page nor IANA’s list prints a total. The figure has to be counted from IANA’s file once the terminated and reserved entries are stripped out, and the answer is 3,321. Domain Incite, counting from ICANN’s page instead, put it at 3,323. Strip out the two drop-catching fleets and the figure that describes registrars with a customer-facing business is closer to 1,250. That is a floor rather than a clean count, because the SnapNames endpoint also carries retail accreditations, Register.com and Network Solutions among them.

Anyone comparing the size of the registrar market with the size of the hosting market, or presenting registrar growth as evidence of a competitive channel, is working with a denominator that one company in Denver enlarged by roughly nine percent in a single batch.

ICANN’s budget puts the accreditation count in financial context. It expects $65.3 million in registrar funding this fiscal year: $48.9 million in transaction fees, $12.7 million in annual accreditation fees and $3.8 million in per-registrar variable fees.

At $4,000 each, the 1,501 named DropCatch accreditations come to about $6.0 million, roughly 47 percent of the annual accreditation-fee line and 9 percent of total projected registrar funding, before TurnCommerce’s variable and transaction fees are counted.

For hosting companies the practical effects are narrower but real. A host reselling backorders through NameJet or SnapNames is not competing with DropCatch itself. Its supplier is. The hosts with direct exposure are the ones running their own accreditation, and they pay the same $4,000 fixed fee and draw on the same variable pool.

That pool holds one small consolation. Its per-registrar share falls as the number of paying registrars rises, so 300 new payers slightly lower everyone else’s quarterly invoice. It is the only way the batch helps a retail registrar.

And any host that markets a “choose from thousands of registrars” comparison to customers is describing a market in which roughly six in ten accreditations run on two pieces of infrastructure.

What the batch does not show is demand for domains. DropCatch’s catch volume was falling when Allemann ran his numbers in 2025, and Allemann’s figures showed TurnCommerce’s own .com portfolio shrinking. A company adds capacity to catch drops when it expects more valuable names to drop, or when it wants a larger share of a shrinking pool than a rival with 519 registrars can take. Those are readings, not the only ones available. The accreditation records show that it added capacity. They do not say why.

About the Data

Registrar counts are ours, from IANA’s registrar ID list, recounted on September 27, 2026. Accredited means the status column reads Accredited, which strips out reserved and terminated entries and leaves 3,321. The 1,552 counts accredited registrars on TurnCommerce’s shared NameBright RDAP endpoint, and 519 the SnapNames endpoint. A shared endpoint shows common operation, not common ownership. The FY27 approval and ballot figures come from ICANN’s notice to registrars and its certified result. The funding shares are our arithmetic on ICANN’s budget. Historical figures are as reported by Domain Incite and Domain Name Wire. TurnCommerce was not contacted.