6 New gTLD’s went into their first day of General Availability (GA) yesterday where they could be registered on a first come, first served basis.
Including all domain names registered during the Sunrise Period by trademark holders and in the Early Access Period (EAP) for those who were willing to pay a one time fee for early access more than 17,000 domain names were registered across the six new domain extensions which is the best first day performance by non-city new gTLD’s for a long time.
Here are the number of domain names registered after their first day
.immo 5,274
.Business 3,292
.Software 3,068
.Network 3,055
.Pizza 1,272
.Auction 1,056
Four of the strings were Donuts and the other two Rightside (Name).
Two of the new domain extensions are particularly interesting:
.Business is interesting because it’s the longer version of .Biz, a domain name extension that been around since 2001 and was created to stand for” business” and has over 2.3 million registrations. .Biz domain name registrations fell below 2.5 Million earlier this year.
.Network of course is the longer version of .Net one of the original domain extensions that goes back to 1985 along with .com and .org.
.Net has over 15 million domain names registered and while has lost some registrations this year it has held up pretty well against the onslaught of all the new gTLD’s.
A number of .Net domain has been sold in the six figures and of course those are only public sales. We have sold a .Net Under NDA into the six figures.
The domain world for many years, has been all about truncation. Companies acquiring domain names with a shorter version of their existing domain.
O.co was the most publicized example of this when Overstock.com acquired it, but there are a ton of examples of shorter is better thinking when it comes to domain name the most famous of all move to shorten a companies name maybe when Thefacebook.com changed to just Facebook.com
Of course these new gTLD’s move in the opposite direction and giving customers the option of registering of new longer gTLD’s that mean the same thing as their shorter but long released counterparts.
It will be interest to see how it plays out.
