Rightside markets .rocks heavily as it finds an audience.
It’s interesting watching for anomalies in new top level domain name registrations. Consider yesterday, when the zone for Rightside’s .rocks top level domain grew by almost 17% (3,817 new domains in the zone, per DomainIncite).
That’s a lot of new domains, even when you consider Rightside registry as a whole. Here’s a chart from nTLDstats showing Rightside’s daily registration volume across all of its TLDs.
Why did .rocks rock yesterday? It seems that much of the demand was driven by a $.98 Cyber Monday special at NameCheap, an eNom reseller.
It’s interesting to watch Rightside’s portfolio of new TLDs. Before the company launched any domains, it seemed to be most excited about .Ninja. The company used it as an example in most presentations, created swag for the domain, and told everyone who would listen that .ninja was going to be big.
Relatively speaking, it was right. .Ninja is the company’s second most registered domain name. But sitting at the top — even before yesterday’s special — is .rocks.
I don’t know how highly the company thought of .rocks before it started rolling out new TLDs, but it strikes me that many portfolio applicants are throwing a lot of names at the wall and seeing what sticks. .Rocks is sticking for Rightside, and now it is applying extra marketing muscle to it.
The company uses Rightside.rocks for a URL shortener, and is pitching the same idea to other companies.
It is promoting the domain more heavily than some others as it finds consumer interest in the domain. (It has not, to my knowledge, created sexually suggestive mouse pads for the domain. Yet.)
As of today, here are Rightside’s top 5 top level domain names (per nTLDstats):
.Rocks 26,710
.Ninja 19,468
.Reviews 9,311
.Consulting 8,995
.Lawyer 8,078
George Kirikos says
Rightside.rocks is *longer* than their Rightside.co — I think that makes it a URL lengthener, rather than a URL shortener. 🙂
Andrew Allemann says
That’s a good point. We’ll call it a “branded social link”
RU says
https://twitter.com/SPN_updates (484k followers) they are using SPN.rocks for URL shortening