In 2025, drop-catch services caught 1.59 million deleted .com domains, one in every 22 deleted that year. Three services caught almost all of them: DropCatch.com 42%, Gname 31%, SnapNames/NameJet 22%.
1.59M
deleted .com domains caught, 2025
1 in 22
deleted .com domains was caught
5.69B
attempts to register deleted .com domains
Drop catching is the race to register a .com domain the moment the registry deletes it, after its owner lets it expire.
Gname went from 1% of catches in 2021 to 31% in 2025
Gname caught 1% in 2021, 2% in 2022, 11% in 2023, 29% in 2024 and 31% in 2025. DropCatch.com’s share fell from 72% in 2018 to 42%. SnapNames/NameJet has held between 22% and 34% every year since 2014.
Each service’s share of the deleted .com domains drop-catch services caught, every full year from 2014 to 2025.
Where to place a backorder
Each service catches with its own registrars, and in 2025 three services made 94% of the catches: DropCatch.com, Gname and SnapNames/NameJet. Outside those three, no service ran more than 45 drop-catch registrars. At DropCatch.com and SnapNames/NameJet, a domain more than one buyer has backordered goes to auction, and the highest bid wins.
Why DropCatch.com runs over a thousand registrars
Each ICANN-accredited registrar has its own connection to the .com registry, so every extra registrar is another place in line when a domain is deleted. In 2025, DropCatch.com ran 1,251 of the 2,219 drop-catch registrars in .com, more than every other service together. They made 2.62 billion attempts and caught 667,517 domains: 3,925 attempts for each domain caught. Gname caught 485,259 domains with 299 registrars, 488 attempts for each domain caught.
Domains caught are down 49% since 2018
Drop-catch services caught 3.09 million deleted .com domains in 2018 and 1.59 million in 2025. Attempts peaked earlier, at 32.3 billion in 2016. In 2025 there were 5.69 billion, 82% fewer.
Every drop-catch service in .com, every full year from 2014 to 2025. Each row on its own scale.
DropCatch.com deleted 168,555 domains within five days in 2025
In 2025, DropCatch.com deleted 168,555 .com domains within five days of registering them, against 14,012 in 2024. A domain deleted within five days of registration is free to register again at once.
Every drop-catch service
2025
CompanyDomains caughtShareRegistrarsDeleted within 5 daysAttempts per domain caughtChange vs 2024
Source: ICANN’s monthly .com registry reports, 2014 to 2025. A drop-catch registrar is one that made more than 500,000 attempts to register .com domains in a year, more than 200 for each domain it caught (the ratio ICANN’s registrar fees use), and held fewer than 50,000 .com domains.