OnlineDomain.com Domain Name News & Opinions
Yesterday 16th of July 4 Donuts New gTLDs went out of the EAP pricing and into the real (reg fee) general availability: .Capital, .Engineering, .Exchange and .Gripe.
The first day, or rather first hours, registration numbers were pretty bad for all 4 New gTLDs. The best one, .Exchange, has a total of 1,252 domain registrations today. .Capital has 909 domains today and .Engineering has 814 registrations. The worst one was .Gripe that has only 367 registrations today.
So these 4 Donuts New gTLDs only have 3,342 domains in total after their 1st day. That is an average of 835 registrations per New gTLD. This is the worst week that Donuts has had since January when the first Donuts New gTLDs came out.
These numbers include the Sunrise (trademark) domain registrations..Gripe had the most with 189 and .engineering was second with 89 sunrise domains. .Capital had 45 sunrise registrations and .exchange had 44 domains.
So this means that .Gripe increased it’s registrations by only 178 domains on it’s first day. I guess nobody was interested in .gripe, not even some big corporations.
Rightside Registry also launched .moda yesterday, July 16th 2014. .Moda entered general availability and got 724 registrations.
(I am always comparing the same first hours for all New gTLDs. The hours between General Availability and the first zone files update.)
The problem with gtld’s like .gripe is that they won’t generate big numbers anyway. IMO these domains are most attractive to the average joe who has grievance’s against a brand or service. It will take a while for the fact that these gtld’s exist to permeate the public consciousness in the way that the original ****sucks.com sites used to.
Should they even find out about them then joe public would have to contend with the fact that a savvy brand would most likely have gone for a DPML block anyway. The result then is the brand doesn’t buy the domain because they see it as protected and the public can’t buy it because it’s blocked.
This means you end up with gtld’s with lots of deadlocked domains…and no sales.
There are not so many DPML blocks as you may think. And there are only 2 registries offering DPML so far.
All these .gripe and .sucks New gTLDs were designed to attract thousands of sunrise registrations but they failed.
People that have a problem with a company can get any (bad) domain they want as the are not building a company or brand and will probably drop the domain in a year. They don’t need people to remember their website and they are not using the domain for email.
I haven’t really seen any reporting yet on the take up of DPML’s so obviously I’m just guessing.
Your right though that .com’s will still probably be the first port of call for anyone wanting revenge for bad service or airing a grudge, although Twitter seems to be the platform of choice for most people who want to do this atm.
These new gtlds are all .retarded and are a waste of cyberspace. Every single dumb-ass one of them
Donuts will soon change its name to “Nonuts” as I am thinking they are going to end up being the biggest losers in this game despite the fact that they raised a $100MM fund. If I where the Venture firms that dropped the cash, i would simply fight for a right to take backs some of that cash before it is burned to ashes
Most of Donuts New gTLDs are making money. .Gripe will not anytime soon because it was a bad idea but there is always a bad apple in 300.