OnlineDomain.com Domain Name News & Opinions
.London, one of the biggest geo New gTLDs, entered general availability yesterday Tuesday the 9th of September. .London got 12,423 new domain name registrations on it’s first day. .London also had 22,633 domains from it’s priority program and sunrise. So the today’s zone file update brings the total number of registered .London domains to 35,056.
This makes .London the most successful New gTLD launch to date but it was not as great as everybody was expecting. I was expecting a number well above 50,000 even without the priority program domain names.
.Berlin had 31,956 domains after it’s first day but it was offering free domains to residents. .Club, that is the only of the top 3 New gTLDs that hasn’t offered any free domains, had a first day with 25,781 domains while .在线 (Dot Chinese Online) had 29,723 domains.
.London is now ranked as the 11th New gTLD in terms of domain name registrations.
Furthermore the domain names with more than 1 applicant in the priority program have not yet started to be allocated. Names where there remained more than one applicant with the same priority will go to auction. Auctions should run in a few weeks. The auction will then take the form of a private and closed auction via an online platform. Several domains are going to be allocated after all the auctions are over. I wonder what this number is.
(I am always comparing the same first hours from their 1st day for all New gTLDs. The hours between General Availability and the first zone files update.)
this is truly a surprise
I have been thinking about it and maybe it is not…
I was disapointed because all was gone. I did not spend a lot of time for it and bought nothing. maybe i was not alone with that feeling.
Same with donuts. I dont want to spend a lot of searchtime for those domains anymore.
for example koeln .. they sold about 10k in the first day. how is this possible (more as tokyo). I think because all was free .. it was a little bit like goldrush time 🙂
What do you think its the reason?
This was not like the usual geo New gTLD we have seen so far.
It was run by Minds + Machines that have reserved a lot of domains and also a lot of the better .London domains have high premium prices.
And of course a lot was gone during the priority program for Londoners.
But I think that .London and all geo New gTLD have a pretty low ceiling.
Definitely agree there will be a ceiling for the city geo’s.
At the moment I think it’s hard to gauge how .london has got on as first day numbers are deceptive. The domains in contention, arguably likely to be some of the best by virtue of that contention, have yet to be allocated.
Given that some of those will end up in reasonably competitive auctions, theres every chance that if we are measuring success in first month revenues rather than day one ntldstats, it could have done very well indeed out of the gate.
The domain in contention are likely to be lees 7,500 as the registry implied.
But I expect the applications to be close to that so the domains maybe as low as 2,500.
Revenue will indeed be nice but that is on day one only. Pure registrations numbers are an indication on string sustainability.
And of course it shows how well the extension was accepted by Londoners.
u right ! this is a very important point.
I like that message, there are not so many good left.right matches for geos and they will be sold out soon and the price for it will climb faster 🙂
my experience about geos is saying that after 1000 domains all super keywords are gone. and after 10k you have to build left-left.right
The market is too immature to draw conclusions on future sustainability based on first day numbers. Particularly given that they can currently be well correlated to pre-launch marketing spend on that TLD (ie. it’s less about acceptance by the market than it is about sales efforts by the registries).
This is not actually applicable to .London. .London will be sustainable and everybody knows it.
But it is applicable to other marginal New gTLDs and first day numbers are a good indication.
We now have data from over 150 launches and I can pretty much see from day one if the string will fail financially or not.
Marketing can only do so much. .Global had better than average marketing yet it has about 1,500 domains today and about 500 from that were sunrise domains: .Fail
I don’t disagree that the numbers are of significance, but we’re too early in the game to draw conclusions for all TLDs from them. The market is virtually undeveloped.
I consider the current phase a ‘soft launch’ – yes, the domains are going on sale but, for the most part, the end user market doesn’t know about (most of) them or understand any of their potential benefits.
Some TLDs will fail simply because they’re poor TLDs.
Regards .global, that faces a couple of issues: its generic, it’s targeting/relevant for a small number of global interests in an immature market and it’s relatively expensive. Their customers should already have a strong .com and won’t feel a need for anything else.
Sure it is a soft launch but I don’t expect another spike as the first day.
Some of the successful New gTLDs will see an increase on the average daily registrations numbers but in order to be successful you need raw numbers at the beginning to go ahead of the competition.
The main problem with .global is that it is mainly on the wrong side of the dot. Only some big companies use it on the right and these are gone already. This is why I heard from the CEO that most of the domains were from big companies and he is seeing “some” interest on generics. Generics don’t work well with .global.
I was looking for good .london names to preorder but could not find any.
Also just pointing out the article’s title has a typo in it. (It’s should be Its)
I might be in 4 or 5 auctions but I don’t know yet. I doubt I will get anything.
Thanks for the typo. It’s fixed now.
Hi Zournas
Did you get any .london excluding auction. I got just one bookmaker.london
I got only one.
can you let me know whats that domain ? any comments on bookmaker.london
Sorry not yet.
I think the plural bookmakers is mostly used.
I searched around 100+ keywords most of them are high priced & other registered in landrush at last got one. I know plural used mostly but it got registered by Justin Randall – jeffreyshenry.com in landrush