Just doing some reading and came across an article from December 31st, not really about domaining but interesting as it mentioned .xyz domains. Some people have commented about the performance of .xyz sales and this might lend some insight. Here's a bit of what it says. I've posted a link to the entire article below.
"Apache suffered the largest loss of 13.4 million sites, followed by Microsoft, which lost 5.0 million. A good part of this month's overall losses were caused by expired .xyz domains, which resulted in nearly 9 million .xyz websites disappearing from the internet. Despite the widespread losses caused by the demise of these websites, nginx managed to gain 7.1 million sites overall, which was the largest growth seen by any web server vendor.
The .xyz top-level domain was made available to the general public on 2 June 2014 and immediately received strong support from Network Solutions, which registered nearly
100,000 .xyz domains during the first ten days of operation. Controversially, Network Solutions gave away many .xyz domains for free to customers who already had the corresponding domain under the .com TLD. This was done on an opt-out basis, and the domains were only free for the first year, leaving some customers surprised when each domain became
due for renewal at a cost of $38 this year."
Link to full article:
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2015/12/31/december-2015-web-server-survey.html
