This week the new gTLD .XYZ past .US, the ccTLD of the United States, in the total number of domain registrations.
According to RegistrarStats.com the number of .XYZ registration is 1,726,541 compared to .US which has 1,670.478.
Keep in mind that .US, which is the country code for the United States, has been in operation for 30 years, launching on February 15, 1985
.XYZ launched on June 2, 2014.
.US had basically a 28 1/2 year head start on .XYZ and now finds itself some 60,000 domain names behind .XYZ.
.XYZ is now the 6th most registered Top Level Domain name.
I’m a data scientist. So I deal with data and facts,
If Daniel Negari will provide me with all the registrations, the fees, the whois, the sales, the costs, and give me 10 days, I will provide the data.
Challenge: If I find any data that reflect “doctoring”, or “enhancing”, he will admit this in a public setting. If not, I will crown him the marketer of 2015.
I have a feeling he will not accept this challenge.
Rightly said.
you can download list from the registry yourself. it’s all public data.
I’ve never seen a guy-Daniel Negari- get knocked so much by so many people that have never done business with him. We’ve only had one financial transaction with Mr Negari and he did exactly as he said he would and paid exactly as he said he would.
Jealousy. Its people that missed that the boat harping on about how:
“gTLDS’s will never work”
“Oh, they are working….well, it must be some sort of trickery or fraud”
Then when its found not to be:
“oh, well i could have done better”
Fair play to Mr Negari, he has made .xyz a success, no matter how you look at it.
.XYZ has stuffed domains into peoples accounts without the owners’ permission and cheated the statistics every chance they can find.
TheDomains loses credibility and wastes reader’s time by reporting these fake “milestones”.
There is so much real news to write about.
Dude all the free registrations have dropped.
Check ntldstats.com
NetworkSolutions only has 18,788 or 1.04% of all .XYZ registrations.
Live in the present. Don’t ignore that .XYZ is in fact the top new tld. One day you will kick yourself for not investing in it.
A little bit of interesting rumbling above. Which is worse, (1) that Negari and crew worked to get .XYZ out there and on people’s minds, or (2) that Neustar has worked so hard to preserve the status quo and make sure the American public scarcely even knows .US exists and doesn’t care since release for general use all the way back in April 2002?
Right, curtain #2, that’s what I thought you’d say.
P.S. .US? What’s that?
Its a .com world
End of story
You tell the billion chinese that.
#MURICA
It is a shame that the .US ccTLD was left to moulder as it could have been one of the great ones. However ccTLDs and generic TLDs are two very different things.
@Steve TheDomains has details of the Network Solutions zone stuffing debacle that had domain names shoved into customer accounts without them ever requesting these domains. Naturally the vast majority of these domain names were dropped when they became due for renewal. You may also want to read the cort documents on the Verisign/XYZ case which detailed how these operations worked.
The .XYZ new gTLD is perhaps the most successful new gTLD by registration volume. However it is dependent on discounting and contra deals to maintain registration volume as discounted registrations, and freebies, can have a renewal rate of between 5% and 20% depending on the dynamics of the TLD. More worryingly, it has a large exposure to the Chinese market.
>”It is a shame that the .US ccTLD was left to moulder as it could have been one of the great ones.”
• Precisely, as in it’s not like Neustar does not know what is has been doing all these years with it. More accurately, not doing.
I am amazed that .US (dot US) has not taken off big time. Really it should surely be one of the largest tld’s on the market, akin to way .cn (dot CN) is in China.
It needed a brand champion to move it forward. The .COM overtook it as the defacto US “ccTLD” and it never had quite the parallel development that the other major ccTLDs experienced. Most of the countries where there is a strong ccTLD have had the registry marketing the ccTLD and driving awareness. The .COM in many of those countries is now a second choice TLD for businesses targeting those countries. While the .COM is still the top global TLD, it is being replaced for locally targeted marketing by the local ccTLDs.
@JohnMc 100% agree with your synopsis .
>”Most of the countries where there is a strong ccTLD have had the registry marketing the ccTLD and driving awareness.”
• Thanks, Neustar, and whoever else might be associated with what they have (not) done and why. By the way John, I hope you realize that exercising honesty and common sense as you have done there so well may be a bit jarring to more delicate readers. 😉
Of course, and Neustar and other relevant parties whoever they are surely know it, too. If Go Daddy had gotten it later when there was talk of that, I doubt we would be looking at all these years of the status quo in which the American public scarcely knows it exists and certainly doesn’t care.
I still don’t like them though. I haven’t seen many at all being promoted outside of “domainer” circles. It’s the public that makes the decisions as to which domain extension reigns supreme, which is why .com sits on top for all these years.
-Omar
If something looks and smells like bullshit…well, it usually is.
You can say that again, Stryker. In this case you may be referring to .XYZ, but you can apply that statement equally to what Neustar has (not) been doing all these years with .US to preserve the dead status quo until now.
Well it’s limited to US citizens only so kind of a poor comparison
Not when you factor in the decades head start, and most especially the 13+ years now since general release in April 2002. Moreover, it should be pretty well established common knowledge by now that Neustar does not enforce any nexus requirement and never has to my knowledge. So much so that one wonders if it’s even part of the written policy any more.
John Neustar does enforce the nexus requirements. I know several domains that have been deleted.
And I have been part of this “enforcement” several times.
The it must be on an infinitesimal and selective basis, Konstantinos, because I’ve been looking at non-US data in the whois for years.
Then*
@John
Excellent info.
& You’re spot on with this: “More worryingly, it has a large exposure to the Chinese market.”
It also very much bears mentioning that a number of the movers, shakers and luminaries in the industry have important back-end infrastructure deals in place with Neustar for the new gTLDs now, so that, among other reasons, would no doubt go a long way toward explaining the widespread *reticence* among them and their industry friends about the (virtual) scandal of .US oblivion all these years. Not to mention of course the general greater vested interest in .com to begin with that has been in place. All that of course is also certainly “understandable” to a degree, so at least it’s good to see a guy like Michael Berkens even making a post that says this much, whereas people like me may feel a lot more inclined and desirous to say what others already know and have touched upon about .US from time to time, however timidly by some before.
13-plus years is long enough to be treating Neustar with such kid gloves about .US, however, when at least for this country (the US) it amounts to virtually nothing less than a scandal and what we here in the States used to refer to as a “crying shame.”
.us is a sleeper, it’s just going through a teen phase of lower temporal development.
Yes, just think of it as a horse that is 5 & 1/2 furlongs behind the pack in a 6 furlong race, lol. Race will be finished and winning jockey drinking champagne and then “dot us” MIGHT cross the line.
LOL, touche from here in the US, John UK, well said. 😉
Yeah, there you go, Howie – “sleeper,” “sleeping giant” – woohoo! – that’s what some of us were saying around 12 years ago already. Of course, the truth being – heavily sedated against its will, kept comatosed and tucked away in some hidden hospital bed…
Well, we all have the answer.
If I would have been buying domains (besides the .com names I had for companies) at the launch of .us) , I also would have bought lots of .us domains. How can it fail? USA and the brandable part of us. As in Buy.us, Text.us, Watch.us — glad I missed that “amazing opportunity”.
And you still can thanks to “the way things are,” Steve! 🙂
The comparison is apples/oranges in tbat .xyz has no real world development or use compared to .us. That being said, it is common knowledge for over a decade that Neustar have been abysmal in their marketing of .us. And they could learn a lot from Negari about proper tld promotion.
Max, they already know what they are doing and more specifically what they have not been doing. It’s not that they need to learn – they already know and have known. Think about it. Honestly, would not even surprise me if it wasn’t even their own decision rather than their own top dogs getting their marching orders somewhere else. Would it surprise you? If it would, maybe your life has gone a bit too smoothly to relate. Don’t exactly see that any influence or pressure has been applied to them to promote and nurture this national resource, do you? And before some troll comes around and says something stupid, they should think about how they don’t know me from Adam or my background, and there’s certainly a bit to tell.
Late to the party by months….but John….what is the deal with you and Neustar?
I can only surmise that you plunked down serious money as a domainer in the “.us” space and (understandably) are pissed off that your investment wasn’t rewarded.
Is that accurate? Because otherwise I can see no real reason to care. I’ve got a TON of domains that are frankly, doing absolutely nothing for me…that is a function of poor reasoning/analysis on my part.
But at the end of the day, that’s what an investment is about…balancing risk and reward.
If .US hasn’t taken off, which it obviously hasn’t, it doesn’t really matter why, it just matters that it is currently a dead space.
Fortunately I just recently started getting email notifications again in time to see your reply here, Ryan.
Ryan, I guess perhaps we’ll just have to agree to disagree.
The way you post about this, however, makes me have a hunch the following possibilities may be so:
1. You’re really young, as in, in April 2002 you may have been in grade school or something, maybe didn’t even know the term “domain name.”
2. You’re not an American citizen and didn’t grow up here.
3. Or, if you are American, did grow up here, and are not so young, then I’d say that’s a bad sign. If I elaborate, it’s likely to get too unflattering and I don’t want to go there now.
Again, just a hunch.
The “deal” is that Neustar has gotten a pass for almost 15 years now, which is well past long enough for people to keep silent about the disgusting status quo. It’s well past time for everyone to speak up and say a whole lot.
It’s about far more and far beyond any money ever invested, too, as well as all the time, energy, and other resources.
If you don’t get that and you are an American who did grow up here and who is not so young, then I will say you must be really clueless and just another sad sign of the times here at home, but I’ll leave it at that before I say much more.
And as far as some of what you said goes, I suspect the opposite is the case – that some of the people who invested a lot of money and other resources are keeping silent out of fear, like sheep, quietly hoping things may change, but not willing to say what has been so many years overdue to be said about the situation and Neustar specifically, with their heads in the sand.
And P.S. – With a show of hands now, does it makes any sense at all as an American how .US has been “handled” all these years since 2002 by the registry? Right, just what I thought…
“.xyz has no world use etc” Then why didn’t Google choose .us instead of .xyz?
Because Negari and crew know how to hustle on a global stage and had incentive to, while .US has obviously has been kept as close to under wraps as possible by comparison for all intents and purposes?
Yes, they hustled google into buying it. ha ha. Obviously.
More like abc.xyz looks good, is memorable oh, and works with the whole alphabet thing they were starting?!
That’s what the whole gTLD thing is about, the ability to buy domains that actually mean something to a registrant.
Obviously, you’ve misconstrued my use of the term “hustle.” I certainly did not mean it in the bad sense. In this context, I meant they know how to get “out there” and promote themselves and build public awareness. The issue with Google is that merely by a coincidence similar to winning the lottery or a gold meteorite falling on your front lawn, it just so happened that .XYZ coincided and fit perfectly into what Google wanted to do with itself. Then .XYZ got the Google bump in terms of influencing even more registration. That’s about as fortuitous as it gets. Otherwise the domain is very unappealing for most uses compared to the best of its peers.
The people who are the most upset & slandering xyz are the ones that are kicking themselves from not buying up a ton of them when it first came to market. So sad.. too bad.. grow up & move on.
Firstly I would like to say I really enjoyed reading your blog over the years.
According to Wikipedia .us domains 1,795,408 (February 2015) which more registrations than .xyz. guess it depends on the source
It is January 2016. RegistrarStats (the source for the two counts in the article) counts the domain names in the daily .US zonefile. Wikipedia relies on people to update the numbers of registered domain names.
Out of all the GTLDs pre-launched, I figured these had the best ability to succeed:
1) App
2) Club
3) Agency
I never would have picked xyz at succeeding. How did this happen? I’m sure Negari made lots of hires, contracted many domain insiders, and made many deals. The Netsol arrangement, among others. And now apparently having established a beach=head in China, he’s going full attack.
I don’t know the man. It’s obvious he has lots of money. I would even be surprised if he’s the one who contacted Mike Judge of Silicon Valley TV series — and paid for product placement of .xyz with Hooli.xyz
How Google came up with the name “Alphabet” for the parent company, I have no idea. But I suspect we’ll all know via a new Google in 2016. The ABC.xyz was pure luck. But I confess to having similar luck in the past.
I’ve heard people refer to Negari as a scamster. I don’t see this. I see more huckster and hustler. In the cut-throat world of domaining and trying to differentiate .xyz from many more, Negari knew he would need to hustle for the extension to gain traction. I don’t like the extension. I’ll never register an __.xyx domain.
But what he’s done is commendable. I assume everything has been above the board and he’s followed all the rules.
The XYZ gTLD is a textbook example of the importance of the registry ruthlessly driving initial awareness. Most of the ccTLDs emerged out of the universities and government telcos and the people running them were frequently clueless when it came to running a business. This is why, for much of the 1990s and early 2000s, most ccTLDs were a second choice to .COM in those markets. It was only after many of these people were removed from the ccTLD registries and or the learned to run businesses that the ccTLDs began to compete with, and in some cases overtake, .COM in those markets. Now some people in the domain name business may disagree with the tactics that the XYZ registry used to grow registration volume but those tactics have been successful. What differentiates XYZ from the other new gTLDs is that the string is a generic. Most of the other new gTLD strings are specific.
This leads to another important point that most people seem to miss: the non-generic new gTLDs are closer in dynamics to ccTLDs than .COM TLD. They have smaller potential markets than the generics. They have a longer and flatter growth curve. And in they define their category. The way that some of these new gTLDs either held back the premium domain names meant that the Land Rush period was not attractive to domainers. The other factor is that some of these new gTLDs had a registration fee that was a multiple of that of .COM or the legacy gTLDs. This made them more expensive, slowing uptake, but also made them somewhat stickier when it comes to renewals. There is little reluctance in dropping a .COM as they are relatively cheap. But a domain that has a registration fee approximately two or three times of a .COM may give the registrant a moment of pause. The new gTLDs of this type will succeed because the registrants being to develop in those gTLDs, begin to use those sites and awareness and trust for those gTLDs builds amongst consumers. What the new gTLD market looks like at the moment is a set of niche TLDs or early market ccTLDs. Individually, they offer little or no competition to .COM but collectively, they have registration volume that as a group makes them a significant part of the market. They are not the success that some of the registries desired but neither are they all the failures that the naysayers hoped.
It also helps that he owns xyz.com and several gTLDs.
Thanks to Google for this result.
The giant who is not just lying around blowing z’s.
Plain and simple, the cost to renew dot us is too expensive. On the opposing side, upcoming xyz renewal period may reduce the overall number and current domain promotions for first year registrations may/can balance out the drops.
Google may have a hand in xyz becoming popular. Since Google is unable to acquire Alphabet.com, they probably shifted their focus to register ABC.XYZ to be creative or it was the best option.
Plain and simple, the cost to renew dot us is too expensive. On the opposing side, upcoming xyz renewal period may reduce the overall number and current domain promotions for first year registrations may/can balance out the drops.
Google may have a hand in xyz becoming popular. Since Google was unable to acquire Alphabet.com, they probably shifted their focus to register ABC.XYZ to be creative or it was the best option.
Unfair claim to compare these two extensions. Dot US is mainly for US citizens to register, whereas xyz is a global extension for all to register.
This further proves that new TLD awareness is rapidly increasing. New domain names are all about increasing choice for businesses and consumers, and it’s clear brands are finding value in the .xyz extension.
I wish what you are saying is true, but do not agree at all. It shows that .XYZ itself has had some success in that regard, but not new gTLDs at all by comparison. If you try to get someone who is not a part of all this to visit a website with a new TLD, what you are most likely going to hear from them, as I already have, is something like “what – no ‘.com’ or anything?”
I see AGAIN it’s the same usual suspects here with their blind hate for this extension, or any new gtld for that matter. I have never in my life seen so many people try their damn hardest to humiliate an extension. The sad part was, you had plenty of time, and it was practically free, but NOOOOOOO, we can’t get behind a new gtld, it might damage our .com investments. Guess what that’s starting to happen anyways. But you will continue to have your head in the sand.
That’s not what’s going on here, John, although I would certainly agree that seems to have been the case with some the last few years. I believe .XYZ has had some success despite being mostly junky. The gold meteor that fell on their front lawn from Google and the cheap and free “slammed” regs have had a lot to do with it. Negari also has hustled for the promo and public awareness. Remains to be seen how much people want to actually keep and use them.
I only have a few hundred domains, mostly .com and .org. So I don’t have enough of these that I care if new gtld would hurt my current investments. Actually I think the opposite, the new gtld are going to push .com value up. I have ~ 20 new gtlds a few .xyz, .tips, .design, .garden with some better keywords. I still think these are all garbage. I see big keyword .xyz at auction, not too expensive, but i’m not interested. I think the new gtlds will get some success, maybe a lot. I’m still waiting for a dotless internet, so I just don’t give a shit.
Some may find this hard to believe, but by coincidence as I was reading your post before I saw you say “I still think these are all garbage” I was planning to copy the TLDs you mentioned and write something like “garbage, garbage, garbage.”
I say that as an end user evaluating whether I like them and would ever want them, NOT they most people in the blogs do as “domain investors” or someone with investments to “protect.”
NOT the way*
And as always, there would be an infinitesimal few keyword exceptions that do go well with them, but that’s about it.
I think most would agree-correct me if i’m wrong-that it’s probably prudent to own one great “keyword” in a few new extensions just in case they happen to hit. We own Vehicles.xyz and Insurance.moe . All the rest we own are .com.
You’re only partially right, but the way in which you are partially wrong makes you completely wrong with regard to wasted time and money.
It’s prudent to own one great keyword in a few great extensions, not just few new extensions.
“Vehicles” is not a great keyword. It would only be valuable in .com. “Vehicles.xyz” is garbage. I say that as a publisher/end user, not a domain investor – the kind of person you want to sell to and want to think something is worth anything.
.moe? LOL. As in Larry and Curly too? It’s BEYOND HIDEOUS. That one would be an insult to garbage to refer to it as “garbage,” I don’t care how good the keyword “insurance” is.
Watch out for .xyz……..soon you may be feeling stupid for not haven invest in a few keywords.
lol