New gTLD Domain Name Registrations has just passed the 1 Million domain name mark according to ntldstats.com.
The official ntldstats count is 1,001,461.
Of course thedomains as well and other blogs have pointed out there should be some caveats to the numbers.
For one North Sound Names owned by Frank Schilling who also owns several live new gTLD’s has over 43,000 registrations of the Million + registrations, in his own extensions.
The most registered domain extension is .XYZ which is sitting at over 78,000 domain names registered but over 82% or over 64,000 are registered at Network Solutions which offered some of their customers the domain for free, on an opt out rather than opt in basis.
In addition, 1,150 .XYZ domains are registered by the registry so they can be activated.
The Chinese government owns about 17,000 domain names in two IDN under “Service Development Center of the State Commission for Public Sector Reform”
Some smaller registries have also registered some domains so they can activate them as well and each registry is entitled to activate up to 100 domain names in the zone file as well which are included in the counts
Outside of the caveats, there are over 1,000,0000 new gTLD domain names registered with the second most popular being .Club with over 68,000 registrations which only had 46 registry owned domains out of the 100 allocation and has not registered any of its own domain names.
.Guru also broke through the 60,000 mark this week.
.Berlin which got off to a very quick start has really slowed down to a crawl as is sitting over 48,000 domain names.
.Photography one of the early leaders like .Guru rounds out the top 5 with over 37,000 registrations.
There are 11 new gTLD’s with more than 20,000 registrations, 24 with 10,000 or more, and 55 with 5,000 or more.
There are about 40 fully launched new gTLD’s sitting under 2,500 registration.
I would subtract all NetSol XYZ numbers as robo-registrations, to be fair. So it’s under a million still, but frankly who cares?
The new gTLDs are not a single flavor to either compete against each other or compared to others, including .com.
For example, they aren’t all different flavors of candy. We have cheese, pastrami, caviar, oregano and some sour cream. Not everyone likes all types of food.
The only gTLD that launched with the claim that it will overthrow .com, is XYZ. None other placed that claim, and we’ll be here a year from now to see how much water that claim held.
It doesn’t look good at all. I think we can now call it a failure. New gTLD experiment is over, it didn’t work. It’s a flop. I wrote about the 7 rubrics to ascertain the fate of the new gTLDs without waiting years. If you look carefully, all has now come true. IT’S OVER!
BTW I said last year, avoid any extension that has ICANN available, any extension that is not registered for ICANN is a joke, and it means it’s not relevant enough for ICANN to protect itself. These are available as I write:
myicann.link Available $9.88 per yearAdd to cart
myicann.club Available $10.88 per yearAdd to cart
myicann.xyz Available $8.88 per yearAdd to cart
icannonline.link Available $9.88 per yearAdd to cart
icannonline.club Available $10.88 per yearAdd to cart
icannonline.xyz Available $8.88 per yearAdd to cart
youricann.link Available $9.88 per yearAdd to cart
youricann.club Available $10.88 per yearAdd to cart
youricann.xyz Available $8.88 per yearAdd to cart
icannweb.link Available $9.88 per yearAdd to cart
icannweb.club Available $10.88 per yearAdd to cart
icannweb.xyz Available $8.88 per yearAdd to cart
theicann.link Available $9.88 per yearAdd to cart
theicann.club Available $10.88 per yearAdd to cart
theicann.xyz Available $8.88 per yearAdd to cart
icannnow.link Available $9.88 per yearAdd to cart
icannnow.club Available $10.88 per yearAdd to cart
icannnow.xyz Available $8.88 per yearAdd to cart
topicann.link Available $9.88 per yearAdd to cart
topicann.club Available $10.88 per yearAdd to cart
topicann.xyz Available $8.88 per yearAdd to cart
icannlive.link Available $9.88 per yearAdd to cart
icannlive.club Available $10.88 per yearAdd to cart
icannlive.xyz Available $8.88 per yearAdd to cart
hoticann.link Available $9.88 per yearAdd to cart
hoticann.club Available $10.88 per yearAdd to cart
hoticann.xyz Available $8.88 per yearAdd to cart
icannworld.link Available $9.88 per yearAdd to cart
icannworld.club Available $10.88 per yearAdd to cart
icannworld.xyz Available $8.88 per yearAdd to cart
247icann.link Available $9.88 per yearAdd to cart
247icann.club Available $10.88 per yearAdd to cart
247icann.xyz Available $8.88 per yearAdd to cart
icannnet.link Available $9.88 per yearAdd to cart
icannnet.club Available $10.88 per yearAdd to cart
icannnet.xyz Available $8.88 per yearAdd to cart
freeicann.link Available $9.88 per yearAdd to cart
freeicann.club Available $10.88 per yearAdd to cart
freeicann.xyz Available $8.88 per yearAdd to cart
icann101.link Available $9.88 per yearAdd to cart
icann101.club Available $10.88 per yearAdd to cart
icann101.xyz Available $8.88 per yearAdd to cart
icannfree.link Available $9.88 per yearAdd to cart
icannfree.club Available $10.88 per yearAdd to cart
icannfree.xyz Available $8.88 per year
I get that many domainers will hate the idea of the gTLDs because they introduce choice to the domain world. Com and country code addresses have good value because they’re the most respectable domains and the vast majority of good domains have been taken up – there’s no choice. People are forced to pay ridiculous prices or make up a word and register the .com, then pay huge sums of money to market it because Google won’t find it relevant.
The new gTLDs will offer that choice and, after a couple of years when people are regularly seeing the new domains and the likes of Google are making full use of them, it will become normal to buy them and normal to use the websites hosted on them. Who’s going to want to pay thousands for a reasonable .com when they can get a relevant and better domain for a fraction of the price?
Most gTLDs are not available for purchase, the marketing campaigns have barely begun, there has not been enough time to get websites out there and indexed, there has not been enough time for people to adapt and build acceptance, etc. So to say that it’s a failure before it’s even in first gear sounds like the ramblings of a mad man. You will clearly want them to fail because that’s the way that your business is not going to be affected, but your wishful thinking has given you a bizarre perception of what’s going on.
Time to back away slowly…
@McGaz,
There is not a single citation of facts in your comment, just lazy opinion, and insults.
Wishful thinking is the formation of beliefs and making decisions according to what might be pleasing to imagine instead of by appealing to evidence, rationality, or reality.
It seems to me that you sir, are the wishful thinker.
Wishful Thinking is a product of resolving conflicts between belief and desire. The difference between you and everybody else who have commented on this post, is that you treat Time as a noun, and we treat time as a verb. Time is a schedule of when something is supposed to happen. A goddamn timetable! The new gTLD idea may not attain ‘adoption’ overnight, but it could trend for one day on Twitter, right? Just once! Is that too much to ask? Just once, McGaz! We look at certain things to measure certain things. Next time before you respond to any of my comments, relax, take a breather, and use your head; else stay away from my comments, do you understand?
I cited the fact that the Chinese strings had not added any new regs, and Mr. Simon Cousins, the Operator Representative came here to confirm, and offer an excuse. That’s how to respond to comments such as mine, bring some facts along. But you on the other hand, Mr. McGaz, think that time is this indefinite period to wait for Registries to get their act together, on an impossible mission.
Time for you to beat it, fast….
How can I produce a fact based on something that has not occurred yet? Both your post and mine were based on opinion. You’ve looked at day one of your timetable and drawn a line through the other 20 pages and ruled them out. My opinion is that you stating that the gTLDs have failed at this stage is ridiculous.
If in 2 or 3 years the search engines penalize or rarely return the new domains in search results, marketeers fail to make use of .brands and the majority of the gTLDs are unprofitable then you can say it has failed. There is a world of difference between a 3 month benchmark and an indefinite benchmark. You should at least be giving a 2 year period before posting statements with such vigor if you want your opinion to hold any value.
@McGaz,
Statistician is an expert in the preparation and analysis of statistics. A mathematician specializing in statistics.
“A compiler of statistical data” – American Heritage Dictionary.
McGaz I wonder if you’re American. If you’re, I remind you of our General Election nights, often in November of such years; many losers are often astonished when the Networks call the election for their opponents before the end of voting based on exit polls; election exit poll is a poll of voters taken immediately after they have exited the polling stations.
Unlike an opinion poll, which asks whom the voter plans to vote for or some similar formulation, an exit poll asks whom the voter actually voted for. A similar poll conducted before actual voters have voted is called an entrance poll. Pollsters conduct exit polls to gain an early indication as to how an election has turned out, as in many elections the actual result may take hours or even days to count.
Yet, Mr McGaz, the result is often bang on. So, Statistics can tell us what the inevitable outcome of the new gTLD scheme; we don’t have to wait years to find out.
This is my quest. Let’s do it civilly.
I am happy to do this civilly, but I don’t think we’ll come to an agreement because I think the effect of time is very important.
Your post highlights how our opinions differ. You’re looking at the sales of the first domains and their daily sales and then multiplying them by the number of domains and days to come. This would assume that all circumstances largely stay the same.
Michael has already commented that the domains which are live now are the uncontested ones that got a lucky draw number. The ones that many people consider to be more likely to succeed, such as .app, .blog, .web, etc are still a while away. I would expect the best of the gTLDs to be FAR better than the worst of the gTLDs in terms of quantities sold and revenue. So I think it’s fair to say that the best are yet to come.
I also believe that it will take a while for people to adjust and change their habits. For example, the world is clearly moving towards searching over type-in addresses (as many parked domain owners will be aware!). The good results from search engines and browsers which are built to encourage searching (better usability and more ad revenue) – e.g. suggesting websites as you type, omnibox, etc. As sites become harder to guess via type-in traffic (e.g. word.com or word.cc), more people will just search straight away.
This will turn the focus even further towards SEO (and Google will love it!). What happens if the SEO experts find that a relevant new gTLD domain are more effective than a long .com? I used your website to find a quick example and saw affordablecareblog.com at $18,000 but what if affordablecare.blog is going for $50 AND ranks higher? It becomes a no brainer to buy the targeted, shorter domain.
The way internet giants such as Google and Amazon react to the new domains is absolutely crucial – not only in how they “advertise” it simply by embracing it, e.g. providing a web page for apps or app developer then having android devices view .app pages (Increasing awareness and acceptance). but also in the way that they rank them. I don’t expect favoritism – apart from geographically, but targeted, relevant domains from the new gTLDs could cause a shift.
At the end of the day, unless you have a brilliant domain name (and they are very expensive!), you need a great search engine ranking or a huge marketing budget to really make the most of your website. So the search engines reactions to it is all important – and that is, in my opinion, the key factor in whether they will succeed or fail over time.
The point is that all of this still needs to occur. There needs to be websites out there and indexed, marketed and established in rankings. We don’t need to wait 10 years before the gTLDs can be declared a success or failure as a whole (We all know there will be a mix of both at smaller degrees). We do, however, need to have a look a bit further forward than 3 months after the first sunrise.
I think we’ve both made our points and have our theories on how this will all progress, but we won’t know who’s right or wrong until we are a few years down the line so I think this is a good time to conclude our discussion. We will meet again on another Michael post! 🙂
@McGaz,
Good response.
But before you disengage, could you answer one question for me, as succinctly as you can, do it in a way to clear this up once and for all:
How can you determine what is a good, or better new gTLD in the abstract? By that I mean, that an end-user who runs a restaurant should probably find .MENU to be better than .DIAMONDS, a tattoo artist .TATTOO than .APP, flirt .SEXY over .WEB; and so on and so forth; the beauty of new gTLDs is it no longer the keyword redundancy on the left, as well as on the right? Is it now considered superfluous? Is it not akin to one buying a size 16 shoes, whereas one actually needs, say a size 13? Are we now surfeited with keywords? Shouldn’t it be to each his own “Better” new gTLD? The Carpenter, his; the doctor his; the domainer hers, the Chefs, theirs; a guru, his; to the Ninja his… ?
Should it matter which one has launched, or contested, when it comes to niche based extensions? I say no, tell us why it should matter. Thanks.
@McGaz,
In essence, there’s no ‘better’ shoe size; we all wear different sizes. So it is, I think with these new extensions. I wear a size 14, so 14 is ‘better’ than say size 12. You probably wear a size 9, therefore 9 is ‘better’ for you. And if Berkens wears an 8, then 8 is better for him.
Why am I wrong?
I totally agree with you McGaz.
Domen
You realize that all of the “better” new gTLD’s haven’t come out yet correct?
Those with the most applications, things like .web, app. .music, .blog, and many more are not out
Only 3 strings that had one more than 1 application that was settled by private auction have launched and 2 of those are in the top 5.
Only one city gTLD has launched.
On the ICANN issue it protected itself by rule there cannot be an a domain name ICANN.anything
Of course like anything else if you register a domain with ICANN in it its the domain is subject to URS and UDRP and possible federal lawsuit.
@Berkens,
I do realize that you ascribe “better” gTLDs in the abstract; but that is flawed thinking, and reasoning.
You just reported that “.Berlin which got off to a very quick start has really slowed down to a crawl as is sitting over 48,000 domain names”, that is as good as it gets; dot Berlin is backed by the city government, yet some days it has ZERO additions, some days a couple. It screamed out of the gates with close to 38,000 registrations, since then it’s under 50,000. I remember you trumpeting that success on launch day. Well, it’s a big deal that it has petered out. It’s a huge data. It tells you everything you need to know about the Geos. That plus the fact that we have over one BILLION Chinese, and the Chinese strings get ZERO new regs most days. WHAT ELSE DO YOU NEED TO KNOW? If the Chinese are not buying the thing, it’s dead!
I’m not going to wait forever to determine something I can mathematically calculate now. Only Dufuses can be fooled now after all the data we’ve got. It’s over Berkens, hang it up.
Do you recall the ecstasy you used to announce your purchase of yellow.diamonds? Do you recall the bravado Zournas used to announce his purchase of 75 dot domains? Whatever happened to those extensions? They are as good as it gets.
Look, I’m not against the entrepreneurs pushing these extensions, I’m against the idea of splintering the internet into myriad extensions.
I think .berlin was given away free for 1 year to people in certain geo Zones which helped inflate the numbers, much like .xyz, but in their case one was voluntary, other was not.
Domainers playing with gtlds is like playing with fire, to many intertwined guys pushing them with different motives in mind, the end user is not getting the true scenario. I wasted some money playing in the first few months, something about them just feels off lately as more come into play, and more games are being played to manipulate popularity of certain extensions .
Roll the dice
@Richard,
Good points. I agree 100%.
@Domenclature.com, your statement “That plus the fact that we have over one BILLION Chinese, and the Chinese strings get ZERO new regs most days. WHAT ELSE DO YOU NEED TO KNOW? If the Chinese are not buying the thing, it’s dead!” is not factually correct. As the registry responsible for Dot Chinese Online & Dot Chinese Website, we are transparent with our registration data, and I’m happy to share the last 21 days of registrations: for that period, our Dot Chinese Online & Dot Chinese Website TLDs have averaged 73.22 new registrations per day, with many registered for multi-year periods. For three of the last 21 days, CZDS has failed and reported 0 registrations, however our registry data shows otherwise. Extrapolating the average of the last 3 weeks over one year, we can plan on adding 26,645 domains in the first year. However, we are confident our performance will exceed this extrapolation, as our registrar activation in China has literally only begun 2 days ago, with the first day of a substantial campaign with Xinnet starting in Shenzhen (we blogged this at our registry website). Yesterday, we activated 35.com with a 2-week campaign push across their entire salesforce. Tomorrow, Nawang’s campaign begins, and on Tuesday we accelerate Xinnet in Nanjing.
There are many factors which are influencing Chinese business, which I’d be delighted to discuss with you, but these are complicated and are beyond the scope of Michael’s blog. The domain investor community will also see the version 2 launch of what we believe is a valuable free service to Western domainers launched on July 1. This initiative is the cornerstone of Western domain investment activity for us.
Additionally, as Western registrars continue to bed-in the deluge of new gTLDs going live (and their multitude of back-end issues are resolved piece by piece), registrars will once again be able to spare valuable and often scant resources to co-marketing. To this end, we are working hard supporting our registrars to integrate the new challenges of IDNs into their legacy back-end systems.
Teams like ours, @domenclature.com, are true and passionate believers in introducing and bootstrapping IDNs for their language communities. China has had 15 years of only ASCII and old habits are changing with our constant activity, but the switch-over is far from automatic. Only continued hard work will succeed — our business plan and mission was never predicated on sitting back and waiting for the Chinese IDN Fairy to wave her magic wand.
In summary, there is zero manipulation of the statistics in Dot Chinese Online and Dot Chinese Website, but far from zero daily registrations.
Best regards, and thanks Michael for the opportunity to correct the record,
Simon @ TLD Registry
@Acro Yep. Numbers without analysis are just numbers. The .XYZ may have a far larger than average Junk Dump (first Landrush anniversary) due to the NetSol registrations skewing the stats. If nobody uses these domains or develops websites on them, then there’s a real danger that some of these new gTLDs could be come like the lesser known ccTLDs that have been repurposed – the ones where single character domains always seem to be available but nobody outside the domain business has heard of them.
@Domenclature The .BERLIN zonefile was stuck at 20140526 for a few days. The CZDS (where all zonefiles are made available) has had some teething problems and this is why some new gTLDs can appear to go without additions for days. In terms of growth, .BERLIN is behaving like a small ccTLD – exactly the way that some people expected it to behave after the Landrush phase. The expectactions of people who don’t track and analyse TLDs were, not to put too fine a point on it, highly optimistic.
@Michael Almost every new gTLD that has launched so far had highly specific (rather than generic) strings and that has acted as a limiting factor. The upcoming generic strings might change things slightly but people expecting the geos to act like normal gTLDs are in for a shock. In historical terms, the new gTLDs resemble the Domain Tasting patterns that were seen from 2005 to 2009.
The problem with the zonefile based domain name figures is that they are quite meaningless without analysis. And merely claiming that there are over 1M new gTLDs distracts from the reality that some of these new gTLDs are artificially inflated by registry reservations will take a long time to gather momentum. Others will not. One could claim that they are up against over 147 million other domain names in com/net/org/biz/info/mobi/asia and that’s even without the millions of ccTLDs. These new gTLDs have to give people a reason to switch from their existing domain name. Otherwise they are relying on new registrations, new developers and domainers for market share. The US market with its relatively underperforming ccTLD .US has created a kind of fishbowl for new TLDs. The .CO ccTLD took advantage of this and most of its registrations are on Godaddy and the Godaddy PPC lander for undeveloped domain names is where many of these registrations point. Development and usage in .CO was low and the stuff that was being passed off as development and usage figures was very misleading and inaccurate. There is a good chance that without advertising and better development and usage profiles, some of these new gTLDs will just be Domainer events.
@John McCormac,
I made a big claim on my post, I declared the new gTLD experiment a failure; I said it was over. And I gave my reasons. So, do you disagree with me? If you do, why?
We are now dealing with reality of these strings – the state of things as they actually exist, as opposed to an idealistic or notional idea of them.
Some ‘domainers’ such as Berkens would want us to dream along with them. I’m not going to do that.
I know some readers of this blog are perplexed as to why I’m always picking on Berkens, even one of them (Louise) chastised me for it, referring to Berkens as the “good guy”. I told her that where as Berkens is a “good guy”, he does have a conflicted mind. He is for the new gTLDs before he was against it, or rather he was against the gTLDs before his against it – actually he alternates this role. This position of his is VERY DAMAGING.
He touts the virtue of every launch, and after wayward domainers spend all their money, he trashes the past one, and begins to pump a future one. WE CAN’T HAVE THAT!
Berkens wants to maintain his street cred while dining with kings. He wants to be a rocker and a rapper at the same time. He is for the new gTLDs, oh wait, he is against them; Constantly showing confused and mutually inconsistent feelings! The question I’m then asking, is Berkens Clueless or Calculated? I’ve come down on the latter.
We are way beyond guess work on the new gTLDs. They didn’t just fail, they failed woefully. Therefore, anyone trying to spin this still is very DISRESPECTFUL, and will surely encounter my wrath. This goes for the dangerous ones pretending to be centrists as well as the pushers.
@Domenclature Taking them as a single entity rather than a group of TLDs, they have not done well so far. But it is too early (days or weeks after Landrush for some) to say conclusively that they are all failures. TLD launches are measured in months and years. If you focus on the daily changes, then every day is either a disaster or a draw or a triumph. The lack of a full year plus first renewals data is why I would hesitate to agree that the new gTLDs have failed collectively. TLDs generally prosper or perish on individually rather than as a collective.
The problem with considering them as a single entity is that doing so ignores the limited appeal and nature of some of the new gTLDs and the possible wider markets (over a period of years) of others. The new gTLDs are, for the most part, a solution for the artificial shortage of domains caused by Domain Tasting in 2005-2009. The problem for a lot of new gTLD registries is that the introduction of the restocking fee by ICANN levelled the playing field. And now these new gTLDs have to survive on their merit in a market that is dominated by .COM and .ccTLD.
The most disturbing trend that I’ve seen in new gTLDs is the compression of the traditional Landrush Phase (sometimes referred to as General Availability) from six months to a few weeks. There is a parallel hype cycle for new TLDs in that there is a buzz created around the launch of new gTLDs that drives interest and also drives registrations. For domainers, it is the prospect of finding the golden domain. This prospect begins to attract other domainers, newbie domainers and eventually end-users. However that’s been largely removed by registries that have snarfed many of the potentially high value keyword domains for themselves and their friends. So what’s left? The public interest generated by an advertising campaign? But there are no real advertising campaigns in the style of the launch of large market TLDs. There is no mass public interest on the scale of other more recent TLD launches. There are no Godaddy Superbowl ads for these new gTLDs yet. It will take time, years perhaps, before there is a widespread acceptance and awareness of some of these new gTLDs.
@John McCormac
It is never too early for anything. When we take a pulse, we merely try to ascertain certain vital statistics. The read can tell us if one is alive, or dead. We at least demand a pulse. Right?
Daniel was really foolish and short-sighted for what he did to soil the .xyz brand. its a mark that will follow it around forever and certainly didn’t seem worth it just to get the numbers as its received so much bad press. i thought it would take at least a year to hit 1 million but even without the fake xyz registrations, the free berlins and north sound names, it seems it will hit 1 million before then anyways.
What matters?
(1) Registration numbers?
Only to registries / registrars and news sites, which benefit from daily fresh stories as the numbers and rankings change.
(2) Reports of Sales?
To domain investors, this is what matters most.
(3) Developed websites!
Regular people primarily care only about the sites they can visit.
Most of us, as readers, are not registries or registrars. So the registration numbers (while interesting) are the least important factor.
I find the numbers interesting because I’m a numbers guy. But I don’t work for registries or registrars. So for me, success of the nTLDs will be measured by #2 and #3.
I’d say developed sites matter the most. Google hates dead and empty domain names, let’s hope that GTLds is not going to be a massive ghost town network.
Yes, the Chinese seems to stick only to .com.
Thank you to @JBLions for pointing out a deceptive comment, that comment along with the comments responding to it have been deleted.
If you own ABC.whatever and want to point it out, fine. You will not post a deceptive comment that you stumbled across a domain that is in fact your own, that is only being done to mislead other readers and will not be tolerated.
Thank you