Donuts Renewal Rate Drops To 85.3% So Far – Soon To Be A Lot Lower

Donuts made a second post about New gTLD renewals: “Donuts Renewal Trends: Day 2”.

Day 2 does not refer to anything other than it is the second post that Donuts does on renewal rates. This is the first post they did where the renewal rate was 91.6%.

Donuts now says:

Up to and including Saturday, March 21, 6,352 Donuts domains have exited the auto-renew grace period and hence their final renewal status is definitively known. These names are from .BIKE, .CLOTHING, .GURU, .HOLDINGS, .PLUMBING, .SINGLES and .VENTURES (the first batch of TLDs we launched). Two thirds of these names were registered after the Sunrise period for those TLDs. The renewal rate on these 6,352 names is 85.3%.

If one third of the domains are from sunrise and we assume a 100% renewal rate on these then the renewal rate on the rest of the domains is at 78%.

Also the renewal rate on the second batch of the 1,818 domains added is at a 70% renewal rate.

But the report again fails to mention that the 2/3 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 names of the 7 tlds.

The domains included are up to Day 6 of the EAP.

Donuts will add to this report tomorrow a further 22,910 domains for a total of 29,262:

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 14.7% of names that were not renewed. We believe most of those names will be re-registered by another party within the next 35 days. Keep in mind that the renewal rate on a full year’s worth of these seven TLDs won’t be known until early 2016. For now we’re reporting on registrations made during the first few weeks of business.

Tomorrow we add 22,910 more names to the cumulative total. After they’re added the proportion of Sunrise names in the cumulative total will be very small. We expect the renewal rate on tomorrow’s cumulative total to be in the mid seventies.

NameStats showed that .guru lost 1,624 domain names on Friday and another 1,115 on Saturday, 1,167 names on Sunday and 725 domains 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 73,682 domains after losing domains for 13 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.