One of the best and most anticipated new gTLD domain name extensions went into general availability (GA) yesterday as .London wound up with over 35,500 registered domain names
.London wound up with 35,557 domain names registered after its first day of general availability according to ntldstats.com.
However .London had over 24,000 domains before GA, in Sunrise for trademark holders and several phases for residents and businesses located in London.
I would say the 11,000 additional domain names in the first day of GA would have to be disappointing to new gTLD supporters and the city which heavily promoting the extension
On the other hand,, .London now has the 12th most domain registrations of any new gTLD and passed much older TLD’s like .travel and .aero
.London is the first big new gTLD that Minds + Machines (MMX) is providing the backend registry services for.
The domain name registrar, DomainMonster had over 26% of all domain name registrations while only four other registrars had more than 1,000 .London domain name registrations. Here are the top 5 domain name registrars for .London:
Domainmonster, Host Europe Group) 9,328 26.23%
1&1 Internet AG (United Internet AG) 5,643 15.87%
Tucows Domains Inc. (OpenSRS / Hover) 4,275 12.02%
Minds + Machines Registrar Limited 1,917 5.39%
GoDaddy.com, LLC (GoDaddy Group) 1,347 3.79%
New gTLD domain name registrations are right at 2.2 million but with plenty of caveats as we have discussed before
The other new gTLD that launched on Tuesday was .Global which wound up with 1,638 including Sunrise and Landrush applications placing it at 163 of all new gTLD’s based on registration volume.
.Global 1st day totals were far ahead of many generic new gTLD’s that have launched over the last couple of months
Today .Digital along with several other strings, enters GA with almost 500 domain registrations some of which were registered by trademark holders in the Sunrise Period but also includes around 300 domain names grabbed during the Early Access Program (EAP) where registrants paid extra fees to have first crack at the domain names
Dot London is a great success and I think that we will shortly see it move into the top 5 of the new top level domains. I believe that the team there deserves congratulations.
You seem to like dot global a lot which frankly I don’t understand – why is that? am I missing something? It doesn’t float my boat at all.
Thanks as always for your insights.
I’m stunned at how low the .London total is. I’d say it is largely over for geo tlds with every release so far being disappointing or having doctored numbers. .London was arguably the best one.
.London still has to go through the allocation process as regards multiple applicants for a domain during/sunrise/landrush so it could jump in numbers as those are resolved.
Most Londoners don’t know about .london, give it time
I think that .LONDON ran into the same problem as .BERLIN, Snoopy,
They both are facing massive competition from the local ccTLD. They are effectively pseudo-ccTLDs operating in a highly contested market that is completely dominated by the local ccTLD which in each case has over 10 million registrations. Perhaps .NYC may have different registration patterns because the .US ccTLD has been so undermarketed. It is facing the .COM TLD as a competitor but it hasn’t any localised opposition.
I think .NYC versus .VEGAS will be interesting to keep an eye on based on the fact that .NYC is restricted access while .VEGAS is open
Many .London domain names are considered “premium”. While some registrars may show many keywords as taken, if you check them on GoDaddy, they can be bought at higher prices. For example, Books.london is “available for registration” at $8,000.
$8K or 8,000 pounds?
USD. If you switch the currency to GBP, the price becomes £4,800.
BTW many normal quality keywords and even non-English ones are priced higher. For example, if you check Alvaro.london, it’s available at $150, while the regular reg fee is $42.
Snoopy
Yes .London arguably is the best new gTLD Geo but I have to go with my hometown of .NYC which i think will be the best
I think with .NYC it has low international appeal. I think everyone knows London, Paris & New York. These are the 3 key world cities. “NY” I think a good percentage would recognise. It is not as clear as the other but it is till a very recognisable place name. I don’t think though a large % of overseas people would know what NYC means. It could work for locals but not international tourism in my view, and I think tourism is a large degree of what these geo’s are about.
NYC is an international brand, so no issue on that front.
The issue with .NYC will be in regards to it being a closed extension limited to locals and businesses with a link to NYC. .LONDON doesn’t have that restriction so there is greater demand.
I think .NYC is likely to be a poor contender at launch, but will probably grow as more people become aware.
Is NYC not limited to only New Yorkers?… http://www.ownit.nyc/faq.php#faq-el
Yes it is limited, Our Nexus Policy requires that you have a physical street address in New York City.
Why don’t most people who live in London know about .London its been promoted?
As a local, there has been *some* promotion and advertising for .London. The London Evening Standard, largest free newspaper, read by almost 1mil per day have run quite a few ad’s in the lead-up, also complimented their original site with http://standard.london. http://fortnumandmason.london too, some big brands have at least started to use the extension.. but DotLondon should be putting every penny back into promoting it if they want success. Still waiting on 25+ Pre-Registration names to go to auction.
I’m not sure why anyone would be surprised at the low figures. If they thought that Minds + Machines had some “secret sauce” that would make their launch better than all the previous new gTLD launch failures, then they’ve not really been paying attention to the data and the marketplace. It’s hard to sell what few (mostly ICANN insiders looking to make a quick buck) wanted in the first place.
The registrar composition is very telling. The low sales figures by GoDaddy demonstrates that there’s little “global” demand for this niche offering. There were also very few defensive registrations by large corporations (see MarkMonitor and CSC stats) — they didn’t get suckered in by the hype.
If this is not considered yet another setback by proponents of new gTLDs, then they’re just continuing to fool themselves.
But George define setback ? New gtlds are going to keep coming out, Frank wrote about a day with 40,000 extensions, so domain investors may never make a dime but what is the setback for the release of extensions. It is obvious ICANN sees it as a way of printing money, there is a big disconnect between ICANN- Registries – Registrants.
When I wrote “setback”, I was writing in terms of proponents of new gTLDs being able to point to a “breakthrough” launch, to be able to suggest that “things have changed.” I think cheerleaders for new gTLDs wanted something that would change the momentum, but didn’t get it with this dot-london (or dot-global) launch.
Yesterday, it was a dot-com world. Today is a dot-com world. And nothing has changed to make one rationally believe that tomorrow won’t be a dot-com dominated world.
If 40,000 new gTLDs want to fight over a 5% of niche market, it’ll be amusing to watch. Domain speculators only have so much money to spend, and we’re not seeing any traction in the mainstream. Once renewals and carrying costs start to weigh on these investors, and without a secondary market to validate their hopes and dreams, they’ll quickly drop their holdings.
Dot-London and Dot-Global were fortunate to have launched yesterday, the same day Apple announced the iPhone 6 and the Apple Watch. All the news will be about Apple in the non-tech press, and news of the disappointing new gTLDs launches will not reach the average Joe.
Oh I agree George the average domain investor does not have the budget to hold for the timeframe needed 5 to 10 years of renewal and no coupon codes with prices 2 to 100 times the price of a .com.
Look at Decoded.co they just spent $50,000 for Decoded.com
“I’m not sure why anyone would be surprised at the low figures.”
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The registry has claimed much stronger demand than what was actually there. They said 5 weeks ago that they were projecting 50,000 land rush names based on current applications. At that point they were 2/3 into the land rush period so they should have and a good idea on it. They didn’t even get half of that projection so I put a big question mark next to why they released such an inaccurate estimate.
I think people were expecting 100k+ names after the first day with this extension. This is likely to be a major point in time for new tlds in my view where people reassess again new tlds and reduce spending further. The last big one was when .xyz and .berlin launched and it was mostly free or bogus registrations. That was a major dampener on the market and I think .london + .global is another big blow.
I think that the reality of niche TLDs outweighed the expectations of domainers. Domainers may be looking at .LONDON as a global TLD when in reality it is a niche TLD with ccTLD dynamics. This means that it will develop at a slower pace and with more emphasis on local and geographic terms than generics. There is also an issue about the new gTLD registries getting their launch windows wrong.
and the Londonite (aka as the ‘Pink lemonade’) has resurfaced …
the Only winners are the registrars.
It looks like .London was only able to muster approximately 700 new registrations on Day 2. I expect that they’ll shortly get down to the sub-100 daily new registrations level, like other new gTLDs (e.g. .Berlin had only 55 new registrations yesterday, according to RegistrarStats.com).
The sub 100 registrations is a typical daily rate for a small ccTLD, George,
These geo new gTLDs are, in reality, pseudo ccTLDs. They tend to have a flatter adoption curve before they reach a critical mass in their market. There is also a seasonal cycle in domain name registrations and many of the new gTLDs seem to have launched or gone into GA at the wrong time of the year.
I think that you have grossly underestimated dot London (which with lags, allocations, contentions, etc. I think is actually over 50k now) and the new gTLD’s in general. I can understand that dot com aficionados have an endowment bias as they own a lot of dot com’s, but it is senseless to let it blind you and continue to disbelieve and doubt the facts that are frankly quite evident. Some new gTLD’s will fail and some will indeed be very successful, but what cannot be rationally or logically denied is that the domain name world has in fact dramatically changed and it is not going to ever be a one trick pony again.
I don’t think that the domain world was ever a one trick pony, David,
The problem is that many people see it through a .COM lens. The reality is more colourful. The performance of ccTLDs is a better guide to how some of these city focused new gTLDs will perform. They tend to be far more locally focused than global TLDs like .COM and they tend to develop at a slower pace. The fact that .LONDON’s main competitor in the market is actually another ccTLD, .UK, makes its performance quite interesting. It will take some time for it to develop a critical mass of registrations before it becomes the TLD of choice for doing business in London.
David
We should not have to guess at numbers.
We know how many domains are in the zone file, 36,787
We don’t know how many landrush or contention auctions there are but the registry does.
If there are domains that have “lags /allocations” we have no way of knowing that or the number but the registry does.
Its the registries responsibility to put the proper numbers out if publicly available sources don’t tell the whole story .
Firstly thank you for your excellent blog – I really enjoy reading it and the views expressed here are fascinating to me as I am not part of your industry.
Minds and Machines (MMX) are in partnership effectively with the city of London for dot London. They are a publicly listed company on the AIM division of the London Stock Exchange and so they are therefore subject to numerous regulatory reporting criteria and procedures. It is not quite as simple as issuing a press release.
I am sure that there will be a public announcement made when it is appropriate to do so, and I believe that the company’s financial results are also due to be reported soon. They should be very interesting reading.
Just for the record I have no affiliation with MMX at all at this time but my family does have an investment in the shares.
David
Well its is pretty simple for a pubic company to release registration figures they just better be accurate.
M+M actually did issue a statement yesterday it was on issuance of shares:
Minds + Machines Group Limited (AIM:MMX) announces that it has issued 350,000 new Ordinary Shares following exercise by a former consultant to the Company of 350,000 share options at an exercise price of 9p per Ordinary Share. The new Ordinary Shares will rank pari passu with the existing Ordinary Shares and application will be made for the new Ordinary Shares to be admitted to trading on AIM which is expected to occur on or around 18 September 2014.
Following the issue of the new Ordinary Shares, the total number of shares in issue with voting rights will be 830,346,821.
This is a link tpo the release from yesterday:
http://www.proactiveinvestors.co.uk/companies/rns/140912mmx5839r
Like it said easy