News from 2015

The five millionth registration of domain names across the 588 new gTLDs for which there are at least one registration occurred last week. Currently there are 5,037,000 registrations according to nTLDstats.com.

Registrations continue to grow for many of the new gTLDs, but many of the winners are starting to stand out. The largest of the new gTLDs is still .xyz with over 875,000 registrations or 17.32 percent of all registrations, but potentially 40 percent of these have been given away in a promotion by Network Solutions where their existing .com registrants were given the corresponding .xyz domain, and hence renewal rates would be expected to be low. But even so, it would still see .xyz easily the largest of the new gTLDs.

The second largest going by registrations is .网址 (.website) but this currently has 349,226 registrations, with all but nine registered to the Internet Domain Name System Beijing Engineering Research Center LLC and the remaining nine registered to the registry.

One of the biggest successes has been .club, third on the nTLDstats.com list, which boasts all of its 206,000 registrations are full paid for.

Of all the city gTLDs, .berlin remains the largest with 157,000 registrations and the fourth largest gTLD, but in June they will face a big hit when up to 90,000 domains given away or sold cheaply in a promotion come up for renewal. So far the gTLD that commenced its General Availability in March has seen a good renewal rate and registrations are still increasing.

A number of other city gTLDs have also done well, with success varying largely due to eligibility policies and marketing. The .nyc (New York City) gTLD is the eleventh largest, has almost 75,000 registrations and eligibility is restricted to New Yorkers, while .london is the thirteenth largest with over 60,300 registrations and no eligibility restrictions. And numbers don’t tell the whole story with many of the geographical gTLDs. Several operators such as .tirol are using theirs as a promotional tool for tourism and business.

There are seven gTLDs in total with over 100,000 registrations. The others are .wang with 138,800 registrations, .science (108,800) and .link (106,500). But the .science gTLD has over three-quarters of its registrations (77.92%) with one registrar.

And there are 94 gTLDs with over 10,000 registrations and 163 with more than 5,000.

To date there are, from this writer’s counting, 334 gTLDs to have entered General Availability with 226 registrars handling registrations for at least one gTLD. On backend registries, Donuts is easily the largest and like .club, claim all 1.354 million domains registered (26.81% of all registrations) among their 173 gTLDs to be paid for. CentralNic is the second largest gTLD registry by registration numbers with 973,800 domains registered across their 21 gTLDs.

But not all gTLDs can ever expect such large numbers. Small cities and organisations haven’t budgeted for such numbers. And there appear to be some gTLDs that just won’t make it.

There are also a number of the new gTLDs that appear to be not making targets or registration numbers that would make them viable. One of these is .realtor aimed at the real estate agent market in North America. Even though there are 95,800 domains registered, they have all been given away free. The operator had plans to give away 500,000 domains in the first year but is falling well short, in part due to restrictive conditions on what strings could be registered. It seems sometimes even if something is free it’s not worth it.

Others that would appear to be struggling would be .whoswho with 31 registrations, .rich (66), .संगठन (.organisation – 123), .ltda (153) and .wed (204). But time will tell.

Overall there are 34 gTLDs with less than 1,000 registrations that have entered General Availability. One, .vote has 653 registrations while .voting has over 11,800 registrations. The latter has been in General Availability for eight months, the former for two months. But after two months in General Availability .voting had well over 10,000 registrations.