Save the best for last! Don’t expect the best new gTLDs like .home and .shop before late 2014!

The Prioritization Draw was held on December 17th 2012 in Los Angeles to assign priority numbers to all new gTLD applications. Each application was assigned a randomly-drawn priority number. These priority numbers will be used to determine the order in which initial evaluation results are released.

There were 108 IDNs with tickets and 1,658 Non-IDNs with tickets in the draw.
There were also 8 IDNs without tickets and 143 Non-IDNs without tickets.
INDs with tickets were first in the draw, Non-IDNs with tickets followed and IDNs and Non-IDNs without tickets came last.

In total there were 1917 applications and 1766 had bought tickets. The complete results can be found here.

Here are the results for all contested strings with 7 applicants of more and 5 of the top contested strings with less that 7 applicants:

I believe that the best case scenario for an uncontested string with a good prioritization number is to go live in mid 2013. The best case scenario for a contested string with a bad prioratization number is to go live at late 2014. That is according to what ICANN has said so far. Most of the strings above more or less fit in the second scenario. .green is a clear winner as it will be a few months ahead of all the other strings from the list above.

Some applicants didn’t buy tickets. I don’t think they didn’t have $100 to spare since the application to ICANN costed them $185k. I am sure it was a strategic move to push their contested string as far down in the list as they could. This extra time could help them gather investors and funds or maybe they wait for their competitors with a lot of contested strings could spend their money at the other string auctions. Or so they hope because ICANN could held all the auctions at the same time and once each respective gTLD launch will be delayed. A collaboration between applicants can not be excluded either. Let’s wait and see…