Your forecast for the best selling TLDs.
This year’s Domain Name Wire survey asked you what your favorite new top level domain names are, as well as the ones you expect to get the most registrations.
There was no clear runaway winner on which TLD you like the most.
.Guru received the most votes. Although .guru is a fine domain name, I suspect that has a lot to do with it being on top of the registration leaderboard for the duration of the survey period. It’s top of mind, while many people haven’t heard about some of the TLDs coming out over the next couple years.
.Web came in second behind .guru. .Club and .NYC also received a number of votes.
While there was no clear winner on which TLD people like most, there was a clear answer to which one you think will get the most registrations: .web. By far.
I suppose I should have added the caveat “all things being equal”, as pricing, distribution, and timing can all affect registration numbers. We don’t know who will run .web yet, so we can’t know their business model.
.Guru was the second most common answer. I can pretty much guarantee you it won’t be within the top ten a year from now. If it is, a lot of people won’t be happy with the registrations numbers of new TLDs.
.App and .Shop also made the top four. Neither of these two were high up on the favorites list.
Robbie says
Dominers should stop thinking about some of the ones in active conventions with multiple parties, after all is said and done, with what they will have into it, they will need to reserve all the top terms, and charge a large premium on anything tangible. After Andrew put out the article about having no price caps on new GTLD’s, only .club made a comment, all the others stayed silent, you have to wonder why, the game plan will quickly ramp up once they do not meet their minimum thresholds.
Jonathan says
Do you have the actual votes listed somewhere?
Joseph Peterson says
@Robbie,
Caution is a good idea. But, to be fair, it’s not necessarily true that nTLDs in contention sets today will see higher registration prices or more reserved premiums. The fact that they’re in contention sets might — might — mean that they’ll be more popular with registrants as well. And there are economies of scale involved in pricing any commodity.
Whether we want to give registries the benefit of the doubt or not is up to each of us individually. But it’s at least possible that a registry could offer domains cheaply even after bidding against other contenders for the privilege of running an extension. If they see high registration volumes, then they could still turn a profit in a lower price range. Will they be that popular? Dunno. Would they choose to let go of good domains at the standard reg fee even then? Probably not. But they could.
Rubens Kuhl says
One thing I have heard from registries is that new gTLD regular prices won’t ever go up, only down, so they prefer to start the prices high on first year and then go down until an equilibrium is met.
So at least for non-premium names, this fear is somewhat overreaching.
Mr D says
.wiki LETS GOOOO