New gTLDs: someone said "STOP"

The 2 of each month is a long day for me because I update new gTLD reports at Jovenet Consulting. These reports are a good monthly indicator on what's going on in the new gTLD industry. It also allows me to note when something is...strange.

Many already offered me to automate this but I like to do this manually so I can "see".

This morning, I "saw"
When I am done with updating a new gTLD report, I tweet about it so readers can click and check the report. Some reports are more interesting than others so, for example, I would tweet about the report on finance, but note about the report on alcohol.

The "Colors" new gTLD report is one I would not tweet the update about but this morning, while updating it I said: "Wow: someone must have said "stop" somewhere here".

Very early, I wondered why registration volumes were so high on domain names ending with a color name such as ".red", ".blue" and ".pink". Somewhere, I read that "red" was a special color in China and this explained these high registration volumes.

If you look at the ".red" domain name registrations' curve, you note that is has a hard time to maintain in 2016 and this evolves even hardly in early 2017. Then registrations drop significantly in a one month period of time (from April to May 2017) and for four TLDs in a row. Something happened.

I don't think that these TLDs, which belong to the same new gTLD applicant, lost domain name registrations because the registrant (the person to have bought the domain names) suddenly said "I am not renewing my domain names".

I think someone said - somewhere - that this strategy, which consists to increase the number of domains on the market for whatever reason, is too expensive and generates...nothing.

So...where was taken the decision to stop such strategy? At the registrant level...or at the registry?
;-)