Brand protection and domain registrar, Corporate Service Company (CSC) issued its latest “New gTLD Utilization Report” which is designed to update digital marketers and their peers in legal and IT about how new gTLDs are being adopted. The report also examines how .brand domains are being used and how effectively the new generic TLDs are penetrating the Alexa.com, top one million websites (a potential indicator for TLD utilization).

On the Brand front in CSC’s December report, there were 75 .brand owners with five or more registrations. That number has now grown to 94, representing a 25% increase.

With 322 .brand TLDs now delegated in the root zone, we are constantly seeing more .brand websites being launched or redirected to existing websites with participation across all industries. Recent additions to the list of delegated .brands include .baidu, .alibaba, .tiffany and
.volkswagen

“Some of the most commonly used terms to the left of the dot are: about, careers, cloud, home, mail, news, shop, store, support and www”

“Here are a few new examples of .brand utilization that caught our attention this month:
•
nic.fox (American entertainment industry company)

“It appears .fox will launch in Spring 2016 and Fox Entertainment is positioning it as “the next big thing”

search.bing

Microsoft’s search engine is Bing

testnavoznja.bmw

(German automobile manufacturer’s Slovenian marketing campaign)

bidding.citic

(Chinese state-owned enterprise)

london.firmdale

(UK hotel operator)

action.ntt

(Japanese telecommunications company)
Proponents of .brand domains have suggested that websites using the domains will provide Google with signals that they are authentic, and that this may influence search engine rankings. We have looked at a couple of .brands that have an Alexa ranking to see which keywords they are ranking with in Google.

In our last report, Google’s registry.google domain, had established a ranking of 14 for the keyword “domain registry” in Google.com. At position 20, that domain still maintains a higher ranking for the keyword than other well-established registries.

BNP Paribas It is also interesting to see that mabanque.bnpparibas, ranks 4 in Google.fr against well-established domains like hsbc.fr (15) for the keyword “ma banque” is French for (my bank) which receives 6,600 average monthly searches. The domain name also ranks 5 for the related keyword “ma banque en ligne” french for “my online bank”. Interestingly, usa.bnpparibas, a domain name only registered in late 2015 ranks 46 in Google.com for the keyword “usa bank” well ahead of well-established domains like barclaysus.com (92) and citi.com (64).

In CSC’s Alternative Top 10, which considers Alexa rankings alongside the TLD’s registration volume, nine of the TLDs remained the same:

.media

.today

.sexy

.news

.tokyo

.life

.social

.space

.site

The new entrant to the list was .global, with .website missing the cut.

.media maintained its #1 position with .today returning to the #2 spot.

Other TLDs that showed the greatest increase in their New gTLD Indicator Scores were:

.global, .download and .live while .xyz’s Indicator Score increased by 33% from 21 to 28.

Utilization of .xyz is still being fueled by the adoption of the TLD by large brand owners such as Alphabet, Google’s parent company abc.xyz