A huge day in the new gTLD program as .Berlin in its first day of offering free domain names, added some 70,000 domain names, more domains than were registered in the extension in the three months since .Berlin was launched.
.Berlin passed .Club to become the 2nd most registered new domain extension (new gTLD).
.Berlin which had been hanging around 48,000 registrations for weeks, shot up to 116,638 registered domains
.Berlin launched around March 19 and got some 32,000 registrations in its first day.
It took .Berlin basically three more months to get to 48,000 registrations.
.Berlin added 70,000 domains yesterday in its 5 day free domain name program exceeding its previous total by 50% in one day.
The registrar PSI-USA, Inc. d/b/a Domain Robot, now has over 70,000 .Berlin domain name registrations, over 60% of the .Berlin market.
.XYZ wanother new gTLD had another nice boost today ending the day with over 145,000 registered domain names, 125,000 being registered by Network Solutions or over 86%.
.Club is now in third place, with over 71,000 domain names.
.Guru is in 4th place with over 62,000.
.Photography rounds out the top 5 with 38,000 registered domains.
In all there are now more than 1,185,000 domain names registered.
Godaddy has just over 21% of the domain registrar market, with over 253,000 domain registrations.
Network Solutions which at one time before .XYZ launch only had 2% of the new gTLD domain registrar market is now number 2 in terms of domain names registered at 143K registrations, 125K of which are .XYZ.
Enom, is in 3rd place of new gTLD domain name registrations
PSI-USA (the number one .Berlin domain registrar) is now in the 4th spot.
1 and 1 rounds out the top 5 of the domain registrar market for new gTLD’s
The top 5 new gTLD domain name registrars have over 50% of the new gTLD market.
All stats are supplied by ntldstats.com.
Looks like XYZ’s activities have triggered a response from some other registries. This freebie fad might be very bad for development in these new gTLDs.
See how this pans out, it won’t impress those who have paid substantial amounts for gTLD’ ~
If ICANN does not step in you know other registries will follow, because even though experienced domain investors know that numbers don’t tell the whole story, there are still many blinded by numbers and if you don’t appear in the Top 10 imo, it will be easy for your competitors to infer you are not popular or you dot suck. So on strings that are not ultra niche like say .plumbing, the more generic extensions will get the novice to say oh that extension has 200,000 regs and that one has only 9,000 the first one must be better. Most people are followers and will go where they think the popular crowd is and use what they are using.
You are not going to have an outsider or small business get into the details of registration stuffing. The few people outside the industry that I have spoken to, asked why is that bad ? So I reg a .com and get a .dotwhatever for one year for free, yes please. They just see it as more for their dollar.
I don’t think that ICANN will step in yet, Raymond. It basically had to be shamed into taking action over Domain Tasting and Domain Kiting and it wasn’t until there was significant mainstream coverage that it moved and implemented that “restocking” fee. Unfortunately, this whole new gTLD programme has gone largely unnoticed by the general public. This morning’s additions show that the .BERLIN gTLD is also going down the freebie route. The big problem for XYZ is that most of it (over 85%) is on PPC landing pages. While it is still in Landrush phase and development is generally slow to take off, the probability of some average user checking a .XYZ domain and find it parked on PPC rather than having an active website is not going to go down well in terms of public perception.
Is it possible that boosting NetSol’s position in the registrar rankings was the intention all along and they saw a domain that they felt wasn’t going to be particularly successful in terms of generating revenue that could be doled out, in their eyes, relatively risk free with the possibility of making some money on renewals rather than none at all?
Perhaps NetSol misses the years where it was the only game in town and wanted to get some ‘credibility’ by inflating it’s share.
Obviously it’s a major backfire, but I think someone once said something like ‘never attribute to conspiracy that which can be explained by a cock up’. In the absence of any proof of nefarious goings-on between the two parties involved I think it was just a bad marketing idea by NetSol that has gone tits up.
I think to tar other ngtld’s with the same brush is a bit of an overreaction as the number of registrations prior to .xyz show, if anything, that there was nothing approaching any unreasonable boosting of registrations.
Of course, now that the effect has been shown to work and .berlin has shown a more measured way of implementing this tactic I would expect that it will become a normal marketing effort in the months ahead as the initial launch momentum for each new gtld dies down and is in need of a boost. Who isn’t going to take a risk on something being offered for virtually nothing, especially if they are end users rather than experienced domainers?
The real impact will be on using registration numbers as a measure of a domains success as more domain are offered for negligible prices. If they can turn at least 10-20% of these free domains into real money at renewal time then their tactic will have been a success.
All the discussion is centered around the achievement and means of mass GTLD registrations. The overlooked and troubling (I might add) issue is the fact that the consumer masses will take for free but not pay for GTLD domains. In the vein pursuit of number one most registrations the GTLD registries and registrars are devaluing the product and damaging the domain industry IMO.
If domain investors think getting a buck from leary end users is hard now, how the heck are you going to sell something to anyone when the guy next to you is giving alternative products away?
what kind of re-sale value will these domains have when they are given away?
Whatever people will pay for them. The problem is that there is no established market for most of these new gTLDS at the moment.
Let me know when they start paying people to register these domain names. Until then, free isn’t good enough. 🙂
Looks like you beat me to that idea George. 🙂 Might as well delete that tweet now.
As I tweeted (which John McCormac noticed):
Woody Allen said “The most expensive sex is free sex.” This might also apply to #newgTLDs and their giveaways.
There are some blighted neighbourhoods in Detroit where the houses are very inexpensive. Many new gTLDs face the same fate. I think some folks are giving registries too much credit for the giveaways, as if it’s some mastermind ‘plan’ or strategy. It’s just a sign of desperation, in my view. If they could be charging good money for the domain names, they’d be doing so. Charging for registrations was Plan A (if they had a plan). Others have tried plans B, C, and D. Now, some of the registries are already on “Plan Z” (Z = Zombies, thank you Brad Pitt).
Their next strategies will all revolve around pleas for “help” and subsidies from .com registrants, in my opinion. They’ll start to beg and lobby ICANN to change the rules (after the fact) in their favour, lowering fees, asking for rebates, asking for marketing help, etc.
Perhaps they’ll start asking for ‘crazy stuff’ (like folks in France who think 75% income tax rates are reasonable, or who muse about 10% *annual* wealth taxes on the ‘rich’). Maybe they’ll suggest that new .com registrations/transfers need to be frozen, to give new gTLDs a “fighting chance.” Maybe they’ll say that .com registry prices need to be RAISED, in order to give their extensions a subsidy to compete. Maybe they’ll just ask for a direct tax on .com registrants, to “share the wealth” with lesser registries. Maybe they’ll hire their own “expert” economists who pretend to support their views (just like ICANN was able to find some paid economists to further the fiction that new gTLDs were a ‘good thing’ and would bring ‘innovation’).
All the left-wing propaganda and insane economic ideas that one reads in the press, which focus on redistribution of wealth instead of wealth creation, will be attempted by some of the new gTLD advocates, in my opinion. Rather than accept the fact that they’ve failed, and move on, they’ll look to invent fictional reasons as to why they’re not more successful, and ask for something to be done about the alleged “unfairness” of it all.
Instead of taking responsibilities for their own failures, they’ll look to loot from those who are more successful. And whose pockets will picked when the time comes? The .com registrant, for sure.