OnlineDomain.com Domain Name News & Opinions
We are almost 4 years into the New gTLD program and domain name registrations have fallen below the 20 million mark.
These are the domain name registrations that according to NameStat.org are in the zone files. These are the domain names that can potentially resolve, i.e. the domains have nameservers attached to them AND are not in a status that prevents them from resolving, such as a client hold or a pending delete status. (Real number might be 2-3% higher as not all domains with a normal status have nameservers.)
ntldstats.com counts the numbers differently and has New gTLDs at 23,683,196 today but with 2,562,541 upcoming domain name deletes. I prefer the zone file method.
First New gTLDs came out in early 2014 when 7 Donuts extensions entered the EAP in January 2014 and general availability on the 5th of February, 2014. Since then total New gTLD registration numbers were mostly going up up until 2017.
The New gTLD domain name registration peak was 26,055,086 domains on the 9th of March 2017. In the summer .xyz crashed losing millions of registrations.
But things are not very good lately for most New gTLDs as you can see below. For the past 8 weeks New gTLDs have been constantly losing registrations at a rate of about 12,500 domains per day.
Of course some TLDs like .club are doing great (.club has over a million registrations) but it would be interesting to see how 2018 treats them.
Finally, according to Sold.Domains, New gTLD domain name sales have not been so hot in 2017 compared to 2016. (Most of the top 2017 sales reported by Rightside in April 2017 were sold in previous years.) And lately sales have been slow despite being helped by the rising popularity of crypto domain names.
I write more as we approach the 4-year New gTLD anniversary and also after the 2017 domain sales numbers are all in.
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Most of the cheerleaders, and PR money has left the building, they will set it on cruise control, and just hope they keep getting that premium renewals, and auto renewals, keep hitting those credit cards.
I tried to market to end users, they just don’t want them, nothing you can do.
Others will think outside the box, and make a go with them, but to be profitable with them, it is very hard if you are not the registry yourself.
We have debated these New gTLDs like 10 yrs ago and people still don’t get it–dot com is KING.
If a company is using the dot net and you have the dot com, you have them on their balls and at least you can send them a X-mas card plus a bottle of wine to thank them for their business.
The circus has left the town..
They needed market demand, right pricing and overall great execution. A handful will have all three.
Perfect example was i .JOBS (example of what not to do), this was released years before the 1000’s of new ones
They also oversold it, like its an answer to all your problems
And oh by the way, they forgot completely about cctlds , in their single focus of taking on .com
Good to have a few nice ones for use.
GTLD = Good To Lose Dinero
Enom is turning into a nightmare after Tucows acquired them:
Right NOW I am unable to login to do domain renewals and the Enom interface is giving me a message:
“Unexpected end of file has occurred. The following elements are not closed: Agreement, AgreementStatus, interface-response. Line 93, position 251.”
Can Enom fix their crappy site so one could login to renew domains?
How do these nTLD numbers compare with the first four years of .COM?
Registrars are now the ones who are contributing the most to the popularization and distribution of nTLDs. They do so during the registration process by presenting nTLD options to customers whose preferred .COM options are already taken. Yes, it will take more time before we see meaningful results, but the machine has been set in motion.
When nTLD strings are announced on the radio, it’s easy to detect stress in many an announcers’ voice when they slow down and enunciate the “dot” followed by the name of the nTLD.
But radio announcers will get used to it.
We all will.
It’s inevitable.
Sorry but you can’t compare the first 4 years of .com. There was nothing there…
Yes we can and should compare .COM and the nTLDs’ first four years. It took almost a decade for people to recognize the value of .COMs. The distribution system for that extension was of Byzantine complexity compared to today’s registry/registrar infrastructure for nTLDs. It is that infrastructure that will ensure the success of the nTLD program.
In a worst-case scenario, if we see most registrars dropping most of their nTLD offerings and going back to .COM and a few ccTLDs, only then will we know that the nTLD program has failed.
It will not fail. The big players (Amazon, Microsoft, Google and others) have not thrown their weight around yet. When they do, .COM will look obsolete by comparison.
When we look at Apple, we give too much credit for the success of that company to its two co-founders, when in fact it was their ad man Jay Chiat who made Apple “cool” and propelled that company on a growth trajectory that continues to this day. nTLD nay-sayers underestimate the power of the advertising industry to completely change public perceptions nTLDs.
Pessimism from nTLD nay-sayers is not going to prevent the advertising industry from doing for nTLDs what Jay Chiat did for Apple. These nay-sayers, for all practical purposes, are simply irrelevant.
The GTLDs are on respirators, for the most part. Major fail. End of story.
Before the new Gs came out, .info had over 5 million regs, so 25% of the number of currently registered new Gs.
Some of the registrars are out of their minds, charging $75 or $50 or even $35 a year is TOO MUCH. It’s sent me out the door in many cases. These marketing bozos need to take what they can get, not drive their returns to ZERO!
Of course, people are going to dump out on these domains. I still think many of them, if short, are total genius, and can be winners if the website is a winner. That’s still what matters. I think it’s actually inevitable that some of these domains will be valuable because the growth of names and accounts just grows and grows. At least on the entertainment/content side, certain naming will win. You can still dictate a marketing campaign with a good short gTLD. That said, many many regular consumers still only really want to bother with .com, and then maybe .net and .org or their respective countries.
xyz should have a comeback, although it was totally overbought by speculators, and I think short ones like .red, .pink, .earth, .blue, .webcam etc etc should all have futures.