Gname keeps .coms on a tenth of DropCatch.com’s tries. Most of what it catches was last hosted in China.
Gname keeps 32% of the .coms drop-catchers keep, on 5% of their tries. Its edge is in names last hosted on Chinese platforms. There DropCatch.com registers about 1 in 8 at the drop, Gname slightly more, and SnapNames/NameJet 1 in 40.
A snapshot of 3 November 2026. Every drop-catcher’s figures, updated each half-year: drop-catching since 2014 →
A third of the names on a twentieth of the tries
When a .com expires and its owner doesn’t renew, the registry deletes it and anyone can register it again. Drop-catchers, companies running hundreds of registrar accounts, fire registration requests at that moment, thousands for a single name, and ICANN’s monthly reports count every one.
DropCatch.com needs about 10 times Gname’s tries for every name it keeps. Both companies’ typical catch lands at 12:19 UTC, eight seconds apart. Most of the gap comes from which names each company wins. Some comes from what DropCatch.com hands back.
DropCatch.com hands back half of what it catches
- kept
- deleted again within six days
A registrar can delete a new name within five days and get the registry fee back. DropCatch.com catches broadly and sells at auction, and about half its late-October catches were gone again within six days. Gname deleted almost none. Count every name each company caught, kept or not, and DropCatch.com’s 6,440 tries a name falls to 3,818, still 5.6 times Gname’s.
Most of Gname’s names were last hosted in China
56% of Gname’s catches were last hosted on a Chinese registrar or drop-catch marketplace, against 30% of DropCatch.com’s and 15% of SnapNames/NameJet’s. 31% are invented strings rather than words, twice DropCatch.com’s share. They are as short as DropCatch.com’s, a median of 9 characters, against 12 for expired names nobody registered again.
On names last hosted in China, the US fleets register about 1 in 7
Last hosted on a Chinese platform
Last hosted anywhere else
- Gname
- DropCatch.com
- SnapNames/NameJet
- everyone else, mostly ordinary registrars
On names last hosted in China, DropCatch.com and SnapNames/NameJet together register 15% at the drop, and Gname 15%. On every other name, DropCatch.com alone registers 21%, more than twice Gname’s share.
What it means if you backorder a .com
For a name not last hosted in China, DropCatch.com is the drop-catcher most likely to register it. If it registers one you wanted but didn’t backorder with it, look again within the week: it deleted about half of its late-October catches within six days. For a name last hosted in China, a backorder with the US fleets alone covers about 1 in 7 of the registrations at the drop.
Source: ICANN monthly .com registry reports, January to June 2026; Namedesk research on 3,000 .com names registered at the late-October 2026 drops and 1,500 that nobody registered again.