.NYC: 22% Of Registrants Bought Only 1 Domain Each, 3% Of Registrants Bought 30% Of All Domains

.NYC launched on Wednesday the 8th of October. I wanted to find who bought what domains and how many domain names were bought by each registrant.

.NYC didn’t get the results some people were expecting and people that registered .nyc domains didn’t have very good taste. And it shows.

METHODOLOGY

I got the first zone file after the general availability to see who bought what domains and how many of them. There were 26,853 registered domains after the first day.

The zone file includes domains registered by the registry for its own use (up to 100), some founder’s domains (up to 100), sunrise domains (368), priority domains (6000+) and domains registered on the first day of general availability. I have no way of knowing what percentage of the nearly 20,000 domains that were registered on day 1 were from pre-orders but judging for the Go Daddy market share and other registrars offering pre-orders, I can pretty much say that was at least 75%.

I used the email address to differentiate between registrants. A few registrants might be using different emails but I don’t think that would change the results by much.

FINDINGS

The 26,853 domains were registered by 9,995 different registrants. That is 2.69 domains per registrant. There were 5,898 registrants that only bought a single domain. There were 4,097 registrants that bought more than 1 domains. The single-domain registrants only bought 22% of the total .nyc domains.

	Registrants	Total Domains	Domains/Registrant	% Of Total
Total:	9995	26853	2.69	100%
1 domain:	5898	5898	1	22%
2+ domains:	4097	20955	5.11	78%

This 22% doesn’t sound so promising and it may seem like it was domainers that bought most .nyc domains but that wasn’t exactly the case. A closer look reveals that there were 9,691 different registrants bought 18,708 domains. That is 1.93 domains per registrant and that means that these roughly 97% of all registrants bought almost 70% of the domains.

Of course you can also say that 3% of registrants bought 30% of .nyc domains. But I think that the fact that 97% of all registrants bought 1-10 domains shows that New Yorkers bought a fair percentage of .nyc domains. Many people and businesses bought a variation of their main domain name so that is why the domain per registrant average for the 1-10 domain range was on the low side: just 1.93 domains per registrant. As we go up the range, things change dramatically.

	Registrants	Total Domains	Domains/Registrant	% Of Total
1-10 domains:	9691	18708	1.93	69.67%
11-20 domains:	202	2886	14.29	10.75%
21-30 domains:	46	1168	25.39	4.35%
31-50 domains:	34	1297	38.15	4.83%
51-100 domains:	13	1043	80.23	3.88%
101+ domains:	9	1811	201.22	6.74%
Total:	9995	26853

Here are some more detailed numbers on registrants that bought 1-10 domains:

# Of Domains	Registrants	Total Domains
1	5898	5898
2	1812	3624
3	786	2358
4	426	1704
5	262	1310
6	175	1050
7	96	672
8	97	776
9	74	666
10	65	650

TOP REGISTRANTS

There were 13 (actually 12 because 1 of them was Network Solutions, see below) registrants that bought more than 85 domains each. I checked to see who these 12 registrants were. I got results I did not expect on some of them.

The top registrant got 336 .nyc domains. I found that he only had 3 domains before .nyc. From the domains he registered I believe that he a wannabee domainer but his picks were pretty bad. For example he got 100 best*******.nyc domains. He bought 3 or 4 words and a lot of domains that don’t make sense in .nyc.

The second registrant registered 281 of the worst .nyc domains. I don’t think they bought a single 1-word .nyc domain and most of the were for 3 or 4 words. The registrant is, Douglas & London, P.C., a law firm in New York that bought such gems as:
catastrophicinjuryattorneys.nyc
motorvehicleaccidentattorneys.nyc
semi-truckaccidentlawyer.nyc
traumaticbraininjurylawyers.nyc
All were priority domains that cost them more than $20,000. Good job by register.com that took their money and run.

The 3rd one that got 250 domains is clearly a domainer that knows what he is doing. He registered all 1-word .nyc domains and got them all cheap with GA pre-orders.

The 4th one is Network Solutions. (see below)

The 5th one is a domainer that got 198 domains that were mostly 1-word and got them with GA pre-orders.

The 6th that got 161 was actually the .buzz registry. No they didn’t get any “buzz” related domains. They got various domains that a domainer would buy.

The 7th seems like another wannabee domainer but it quite a mystery to me. She runs a queer women website and bought various domains not related with queer women. Most were quite bad and included some adult domains that are not queer at all. Se registered celebrity names, famous app names, ticket and discount domains, and even typos of celebrities. I can’t stop laughing. Sorry but I have to share this domain she got: tinyfey.nyc.

The 8th was luxury company Richemont North America that bought 118 domains in sunrise.

The 9th was another attorney. He got 102 domains and did a lot better than the ones above. He got them all in general availability.

The 10th registrant bought 100 domains and he is probably a small scale domainer. He probably doubled his portfolio with these purchases. I don’t like his domains.

The 11th registrant got another 100 domains that were mainly world cities. He probably doubled his portfolio as well.

The 12th registrant is the .nyc registry with 98 domains. Some typos included.

The 13th registrant got 95 domains. He bought mainly first name domains and I think he doubled his portfolio as well.

So the largest .nyc registrants were 3 small and 2 large domainers, 2 wannabee domainers, the .NYC registry, 2 lawyers, 1 New gTLD registry, and a company that bought all its 118 domains in sunrise. The latter 4 were kind of a surprise for me.

PROBLEMS

One problem I encountered was Network Solutions and their bad and dangerous habit of putting “no.valid.email@worldnic.com” as the administrative email in whois. 214 domains have this email address. And of course a few of the pre-order auctions (snapnames, go daddy etc) were still pending. More on this below.

TODO

I will run the same test when the registered domains have reached at about 55,000. .NYC is at 42,644 today and on the 10th place of all New gTLDs. That is because the first zone file might be not representative enough. The first zone file includes more than 6,000 priority domains and many thousands of pre-orders scheduled for general availability. Both priority and pre-order domains are registered by the most domain savvy registrants such as domainers and computer/internet related companies. A new zone file in a few month will include the priority domain auctions but will also include a lot of latecomers. Latecomers are closer to the real people that New gTLD registries need to grow their extensions. Domainers pretty much get what they want on day 1 and move one to the next domains.