Christopher Hofman of EuropeanDomainCentre.com did a big piece back in August where he got insight from several industry players on the new gtld program. He revisited these individuals with some new questions for the New Year. The primary theme was what is inherent or the DNA of a successful new gtld ?
From the article:
To help them on their way I asked these additional questions:
– Do successful new gTLDs share common traits ?
– Is there a way to spot the success of future launches in the registration stats?
– Why does .link get 50.000 registrations, when .direct only has 4.000 ?
– What is it about the success of .club or .guru that other registries might have missed?The participants share a lot of their knowledge in this roundup. So if you want to understand better the new gTLD market you’re in for a treat. Personally I had several aha moments going through their analysis.
Here was how one participant answered the question of: “What is it about the success of .club or .guru that other registries might have missed?”
Andy Churley of Famous Four Media answered:
Can .Club truly be called a successful gTLD? Certainly it has reasonable registration volumes (at time of writing 156,000 names) compared with other gTLDs. These registrations were achieved through hard work and good marketing, but at what cost? With the larger registrars retailing .CLUB domain names at below $10, the total first year revenue (excluding premium domains) will be a maximum $1.5 million even if all registrars were selling at cost.
In order to obtain these hard won registrations, .CLUB has reportedly spent way over $5 million on marketing and will be spending an additional $3.5 million next year. There is no denying the quality and quantity of the marketing efforts expended by .CLUB to date, and as a marketer I applaud the professionalism of their campaigns. However, looking at these (admittedly speculative) figures, would a financial director consider .CLUB to be a successful business at the moment?
Read the full story on EuropeanDomainCentre.com
Aren’t he supposed to use dot Euro or whatever that extension is since he is in Europe?
.club is way behind their targets of 300 to 400k during GA and 1m in 1st year., but I do applaud their fantastic marketing programs. They are doing the right things, but the market is simply not that hot as expectec.
The top 3 (XYZ, CLUB, WANG) may be called successful new gTLDs in 2014 if success can be defined in terms of the number of paid registrations. But, who knows who will be the top 3 in the new year of 2015. In any industry with thousands of competitors, the top 3 is beauty. Keep up the good work.
Interesting but the question of registries or registry proxies boosting figures does seem to be ignored. Some of the important parts of what makes a TLD a success are mentioned (community).
The mention of the geo ngTLDs is interesting but it misses the very important point about how geo TLDs are different from ordinary gTLDs. The geo TLDs have assumed ccTLD growth patterns and this seems to be quite an unknown to people who only have experience of .COM TLD.