.Guru Slips Out Of the Top 10 New gTLDs After Losing 8,383 Domains

Donuts has been making a lot of posts in the past few days about the New gTLD renewal rate that is currently resting at about 70%.

.Guru is doing worse than 70%. .Guru domain names registered the day after general availability have a <=60% renewal rate. Overall renewal rate must be at about 65% and dropping.

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 on Monday and another 597 on Tuesday because of expiring domains that were removed from the zone file.

These deletions from the zone file left .Guru with 73,085 domains on Tuesday 03/24 and .nyc had 73,059. They were are positions #7 and #8 respectively.

But then .guru lost another 491, 350 and 353 in the next 3 days and that made .guru slip out of the top 10 new gtlds, in terms of domain registrations.

03/25
7    .nyc         73,136    77
8    .link         73,020    179
9    .top         72,668    336
10    .guru         72,594    -491
11     .science     69,572    2229

03/26
7    .top         74,778    2,110
8    .link         73,965    945
9    .nyc         73,219    83
10    .guru         72,244    -350
11    .science     71,204    1632

(To be fair these numbers 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 71,891 domains after losing 8,383 domains for 17 consecutive days.

This is today’s ranking:

1    xyz     840,423
2    网址 (chinese web address)
3    club     186,652
4    berlin     153,297
5    wang (net)     135,001
6    realtor     94,977
7    top     75,674
8    link     74,325
9    nyc     73,300
10    science     72,185
11    guru     71,891

.Guru last high was on the 26th of February when it had 80,274 domain names.

Of course a lot of the top 10 New gTLDs have given out free domain names or alot of domains owned by the registry are in the zone files.

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.