Stats Spin? .London Renewal At 75.4% For Sunrise, Landrush & 1st Day Domains

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The .London registry along with Minds + Machines (LSE:MMX)) announced today that the renewal rates for .London domain names “exceeded expectations by reaching 75.4%.”

However that “renewal rate is for a total of 38,389 names applied for during the Dot London combined Sunrise and Landrush period as well as the first day of General Availability, registered between August 19th and September 9th 2014.”

All domain renewals have passed their grace periods.”

Domain names acquired in Sunrise are by trademark holders. In Landrush people paid an extra fee to get early access to domain names prior to them becoming available on a first come, first served  basis known as General Availability .

Renewal rates for domains registered in Sunrise, in Landrush and on the first day of General Availability tend to have a higher renewal rate than domains registered after as they are of a high quality.

In the same press release Dot London says:

“There are over 70,000 registered domain names”‘

However according to NameStat.org which takes into account all expired domain names, there are just over 60,000 .London domain names, meaning that the real renewal rate for .London is quite lower than the announced 75.4% rate.

ntldstats.com is also showing almost 9,200 .London domain names in the upcoming delete cycle as well making the announcement of a “renewal rate” premature.  Most registries like Verisign for .Com announce their renewal rate for all domain names registered that wind up getting deleted.

.Com traditional renewal rates are around 73% but that is for a full cycle, looks like .London is about to lose another 9K+ domain names that were registered after Sunrise, Landrush and the 1st day of GA.

 

 

About Michael Berkens

Michael Berkens, Esq. is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of TheDomains.com. Michael is also the co-founder of Worldwide Media Inc. which sold around 70K domain to Godaddy.com in December 2015 and now owns around 8K domain names . Michael was also one of the 5 Judges selected for the the Verisign 30th Anniversary .Com contest.

Comments

  1. John UK says

    I think the figure given by M & M is BS. I have been watching quite a few .london and they are dropping quicker than the flies I have just sprayed. I just have my doubts over whether or not it is a sustainable tld.

    • Daniel Scott says

      What, are you serious? You’ve not invested all your cash in .com by any chance have you John?

  2. M. Menius says

    It would be interesting to learn the extent of .london buy-in from holders of really good co.uk domains. As of yet, I haven’t seen any analysis on this.

    Searching on Google indexed websites for .london vs. .nyc yields about 50% more indexed pages for .nyc even though it was released after .london.

    • Dk says

      Drop rate is extremely low on .nyc . I dont know stats for sure, but i wouldn’t be surprised if it had 90%+ renewal rate.
      Biggest difference between .nyc and .london is
      a) premium price renewal (and lack there off on .nyc)
      and
      b) strong backing of the city government in embracing it .

      In new york there are huge projects that either developed through or on .nyc . Plus there is living in nyc requirement, which i am not sure if plays significant role in that.

      I dont know if that’s the case for .london

  3. Joseph Peterson says

    Looks like the .LONDON registry chose a premature press release in order to report an inflated renewal rate.

    That’s not surprising. But I’m glad it’s being pointed out by a few people.

    • Brad Mugford says

      This is a deceptive use of statistics. Donuts did the exact same thing when their first batch of extensions (.GURU and others) came up for renewal.

      They said there was a 91% renewal rate for sunrise and EAP purchases. They promised to keep updating the stats as time went on, but it was not long after that when the number started to go down drastically that the reports stopped.

      Brad

  4. John McCormac says

    EA and early registrations typically have higher renewal rates. The more expensive the registration fee, the less likely that the registrant will drop it. Of course it is only when the first year of operation is completed that it is possible to calculate accurate renewal rates for the first year of operation.

    The .COM renewal rates are not a valid comparison as what Verisign publishes is a combined or “blended” renewal rate which includes historical registrations. A more accurate comparison, and even that’s not completely reliable since .COM has a 30 year history, would be the one year registrations renewal rate from the same period last year. These new gTLD registrations are effectively initial registrations with no renewal history being renewed. There’s also another complicating factor of multi-year initial registrations being included.