Donuts General Availability Renewal Rate Is About 70%

Donuts made a 3rd post today about New gTLD renewals: “Donuts Renewal Trends: Day 3”.

(Day 3 does not refer to anything other than it is the third post that Donuts does on renewal rates.) This is the first post they did where the renewal rate was 91.6% and the second post with a 85.3% rate.

Donuts now says:

Up to and including Sunday March 22 2015, 29,262 Donuts domains have passed through the auto-renew grace period and hence their final renewal status is definitively known. Most of these names are from the .BIKE, .CLOTHING, .GURU, .HOLDINGS, .PLUMBING, .SINGLES and .VENTURES TLDs, but some are Sunrise names from .CAMERA, .EQUIPMENT,.ESTATE, .GALLERY,.GRAPHICS, .LIGHTING, and .PHOTOGRAPHY.

27,214 of the 29,262 names were registered after the Sunrise period. The renewal rate on the 29, 262 names is 74%. Tomorrow an additional 8,595 names will join the cumulative total.

The renewal rate on the third batch of the 22910 domains added is at about 71% renewal rate.

These domains include a few EAP domains and the General Availability names for the first 7 Donuts New gTLDS as well as the sunrise domains of the second batch of Donuts 7 New gTLDs (<600).

If you take out these EAP domains and the sunrise domains I estimate the General Availability renewal rate to be close to 70%. That is a good number but GA is when most of the good domains of each New gTLD are gone. And this is the day when all the pre-orders kick in.

I will do some of my own testing tomorrow to determine exactly what is going on with the .guru renewals that I expect to be lower than the cumulative Donuts renewal rate.

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.