OnlineDomain.com Domain Name News & Opinions
Earlier this morning, WordPress and the .blog registry announced they reached 100,000 registered domain names.
They reached this milestone when the domain kitchenmagic.blog was registered. It has been eight months ago that .blog domains became available to the general public.
The launch was far from smooth but the registry is slowly building its wordpress reputation. All 2 and 3 letter domains together with most dictionary domains are reserved or priced very high.
Since launch the registration numbers grow consistently, with an average of 300 new .blog domains registered each day.
It was obvious from the launch that the registry knew very little about domain names. This is what they said today:
“During this time, we’ve focused our efforts on learning as much as possible about our registrars, resellers, and end users, and on understanding the makeup of our baseline numbers. Recently, we’ve begun to experiment with .blog marketing programs, with our first campaigns launching just last month. It’s been a busy year for us, and we’re only ramping up.
On the road to 100,000 domains, we’ve remained committed to our top priorities: usage, transparency, and stability through consistent, sustainable growth. The proof is in the numbers: 66.5% of .blog domains have a unique website associated with them, compared to an average of 39.3% for both new and legacy TLDs, according to recent research by Daniel Ruzzini-Mejia (co-founder and CSO of DomainsBot Srl, the company behind big-data analysis platform Pandalytics). Ruzzini-Mejia also found more than 250 .blog domains that use an eCommerce platform, “which actually indicates that there’s people using .blog not only for blogging, but also for business,” he said, pointing out the broader opportunities for .blog websites.
Looking to the future, we plan to continue using our data-oriented approach to push the limits on usage and growth, while working with registrars to understand their needs as the new top-level domain market matures. Our first marketing programs are proving to be a great starting point and will form the basis of future growth opportunities. All of our current and future efforts will aim to empower our target audience to do what it does best: blog!
We thank you all for helping us along the way, and are excited to continue the journey to one million thriving .blogs.”
They said they were going to do 250,000 registrations during the 2016 launch.
Still short of that goal.
They had no clue about domains and messed up the launch. They are very slowly learning. They started learning the hard way after the launch.
I don’t understand companies like this that think they know it all and never ask for outside help.
They might be boasting about “usage” but I think that usage is people registering via WordPress.com from the stats.
I’m pretty sure a lot of these people are buying a .blog domain for 1 year, writing 1 blog post, and will drop the domain. I guess Automattic doesn’t care?
WP developers/designers have been actively trying to promote WordPress as “not just blogging software” for years. It doesn’t send the right message when the company behind WordPress is promoting a .blog domain extension. 🙂
You are right about the blogging software. But I guess they had to get .blog.