.ONLINE surpasses 1 million domains

Radix announced that its flagship TLD, .ONLINE, has surpassed 1 million domains under management. .ONLINE is one among the few nTLDs that have crossed the 1 million mark, which now makes it the 5th largest nTLD by zone size. Namestat shows .online at 909,461 domains but it is not uncommon for zone files to give a smaller number due to various reasons.

The journey of .ONLINE began back in November 2014 when a joint venture between industry players Radix, Tucows, and Namecheap won the rights to .ONLINE in a private auction. Owing to their confidence in the potential of .ONLINE, Radix pursued to buy out the full rights to this TLD from all parties.

The term “online” is one of the most popular keywords used in domain names world-wide. As of December 2017, close to 900K  domain names registered in .COM, .NET, .ORG, .INFO, .US and .BIZ contained the term ‘online’. Of these, over 600K domain names ended in the word “online”. In the last one year alone, over 130K domain names have been registered on legacy TLDs ending in the word ‘online’.

Speaking about .ONLINE’s success and growth potential, Sandeep Ramchandani, CEO, Radix, said, “Our goal is to offer customers their ‘first choice name’ for their online identities.. Businesses and consumers have long settled for long and less memorable domains on familiar, legacy strings such as .com. Given that the keyword ‘online’ has always been a popular domain name-ending, .ONLINE offers the global audience an opportunity to get their first-choice domain name without having to compromise. With only 1M .ONLINE names vs 135M .com names taken, there is ample availability for customers and tremendous growth for us to tap into.”    

Based on an internal analysis by Radix, 65% of developed .ONLINE domains are in use by SMBs. Till date, .ONLINE has generated over $13M in revenue of which $1.5M has come from premium domains sold directly by the registry, and close to 90 premium .ONLINE domains have been sold organically in the aftermarket. To further expand .ONLINE’s footprint, Radix is presently working on a large-scale end-customer marketing campaign for the TLD; slated to launch in Q1 2019. Through the campaign, Radix aims to broaden awareness about .ONLINE by directly targeting active-intent users.