OnlineDomain.com Domain Name News & Opinions
Donuts made a post today about New gTLD renewals: “Donuts Renewal Trends: First Definitive Report”.
Donuts said:
Up to and including yesterday, Friday, March 20 2015, 4,534 Donuts domains have passed through the auto-renew grace period and hence their final renewal status is definitively known.
These names are from the first 7 Donuts New gTLDs: .BIKE, .CLOTHING, .GURU, .HOLDINGS, .PLUMBING, .SINGLES and .VENTURES.
More than half of these names were registered after the Sunrise period for those TLDs. The renewal rate on the 4,534 names is 91.6%.
But the report fails to mention that the other half of these domains, that are not Sunrise domains, are Early Access Program (EAP) domains. This means that the registrants paid an extra fee to purchase this names ranging from $150 and up to $12,500. These registrants, as I have said many times, are not going to drop these domains so easily as they are probably more knowledgeable and have invested more money. And of course these domains are probably the best of the 7 tlds.
The domains included are up to Day 5 of the EAP. (the report probably does not include all Day 5 domains)
Donuts will add to this report tomorrow a further 1,818 domains for a total of 6,352:
Each day (or few days) we’ll provide updated information on renewals. We’ll also report on the status of deleted names, in today’s case the 8.4% of names that were not renewed. We predict most of those names will be re-registered by another party within 35 days.
Tomorrow we’ll report on a cumulative total of 6,352 domains (up to and including the names that exit auto-renew today). We expect the blended renewal rate on those names to be in the mid eighties (it will drop from today’s percentage due to the declining proportion of Sunrise names in the cumulative total).
NameStats showed that .guru lost 1,624 domain names on Friday and another 1,115 today because of expiring domains that were removed from the zone file. To be fair these number do not mean that all these domains will be dropped. But it means that the domains have not been renewed up until today and the registrars are either putting the domains on hold or dropping them.
.Guru now has 75,574 domains after losing domains for 11 consecutive days.
.Guru last high was on the 26th of February when it had 80,274 domain names.
Only 10% of all .Guru domains had been renewed, 1 month before the 1 year anniversary.
After the report I did I thought that a 50% renewal rate will a great result for .guru. We’ll wait and see. Of course I was talking about the complete 2014 zone file and not just sunrise and EAP and even General Availability day.
Here are the results of the “Are You Renewing Your New gTLD Domains?” poll that had over 500 votes.
I will not renew 50% of my ten new gtlds, i think with the premiums and eap people may need to not get personal and decide if it is really worth the cost, or at least develop some of these new extensions
I’d predict 35% renewals when they get all the numbers
16%
Donuts is trying hard to BS the truth, have to be some twisted numbers, if you are going to put out a number, place some facts, and examples behind it.
TOTAL BS
This is a deceptive use of statistics.
91% of 4,500 registrations. A relatively insignificant sample size.
These are also registrants who paid huge premiums, up to $12,500, for their domain.
So 91% of registrants who paid huge premiums (up to $12,500) to register a domain are willing to pay for renewal fee? Who cares.
Extensions like .GURU are going to get slaughtered in total registrations when all is said and done.
Brad
Brad, you are right, there are some horrible names registered in .guru that make no sense, no way they can maintain some 92% auto renewal rate as they somehow claim to fame. Do they really think skewing such numbers will make this a valuable extension?
There is just way to much supply out there for anyone to care, there are a few domainers who went hardcore into these extensions, premium, and what not, and now they are feeling the renewal pressure.
Rate is down to 85% today.
Here are the latest stats.
I renewed the majority of my gTLDs so far this year, including less than 10 .guru, all the .photography, .technology and .graphics ones which were acquired during the variable pricing period.
Dropped 3 .sexy so that’s about 95%+ hold rate across all gTLDs for me. On another note, I dropped 5 .Biz and about 2-3 .US domains that I have no use for in a world full of gTLD alternatives.