Donuts’ first domain name registrations are starting to drop. Here are initial numbers.
Donuts is releasing renewal numbers for its new TLDs daily as the first batch of names exit the auto-renew grace period.
Yesterday, Donuts COO and Co-Founder Richard Tindal blogged results for the 6,352 Donuts domains that exited the grace period as of Saturday. Of these, 85.3% were renewed.
About one third of these domain names were sunrise registrations, which should have a higher-than-normal renewal rate. That means the others were bought in Early Access at premium prices. I’m actually a bit surprised that these don’t have a higher renewal rate, but we’re looking at a small sample size. Early Access domains had a higher first year price, and second year prices revert to normal.
A lot more domain names are about to exit the grace period. Today, Donuts will add 22,910 names to the cumulative total. It expects the renewal rate to drop to the mid seventies at that point.
Donuts has predicted an 80% + renewal rate on its domain names in total. It seems that the first batch of names will struggle to hit this number. Even if Donuts hits these numbers overall, it makes sense that the renewal rates on the initial batches of Donuts’ domains is lower. .Guru and .Photography were in Donuts’ first two releases, and these are its two most-registered domain names. The more registrations, the lower the quality of some of the registrations. .Guru in particular will be a challenge. It was one of the first domains to launch and is fairly generic, which led to a lot of speculation.
To be fair to .guru, there are some good names being used. Well, I suppose I’m biased as I use a .guru.
But I will bet that people who would have used .photography might move to the shorter .photo and/or .photos.
Sure, the best domains were probably registered early on, too. In making its case for high renewal rates, Donuts said that the smaller-sized TLDs have higher quality domains registered. In other words, generally speaking, domains in the first ten thousand are better than domains in the fifty-thousands. That makes sense to me.
It is time for a reality check, I have seen guys in the forums dumping their gtlds, with lower, and lower pricing, but no takers.
Most got hit with the dreaded auto renewal, the rest will be a blood bath, with new reg rolling out, you are not really drop catching anything of value, or quality in a non existent marketplace.
.mobi dejavu
imho, the business model is atrocious( few great exceptions such as .global, .link, .club and few others), indeed. insane off the registry pricing, insane renewals, .. having mentioned that, I also believe the model will change, it has to, because the biggest appeal, the appeal that should be the loudest, is truly unbeatable: meaning. new gTLDs to non tech, non name investors segment out there will succeed because it has language-meaning; and, imho, the second factor that will make these strings survive: IDN.. the appeal is incredible to a -lot- of nations. and I agree with the above comment, the greedy will get blodshed every other semester, starting now…. and finally, the extent of how many extensions will come ( and will go ) will border the extent of languages, there are only so/finite ways of communicating, it will stop there, then ICANN’s fee to apply to a new tld will be 185 rather than 185k, making it very important to proper-modelled new gtlds -today- to ensure IDN adoption ( 2nd domain ), that is the only way to compete with upcoming … .clubE, and other inevitable translations …. this is only my .2 cents, … i also think .com will only increase its value; I noticed few people registering the gTLD equivalent in .com lately .. the only way new gTLDs will go away would be the sudden birth of a new DNS system or embedded apps that would make URLs obsolete, but that would mean shadowing .com too; as DNW published a few days ago, the threat is not old tlds Vs. new Tlds … “dot com is king” Vs “.whatever” is a very silly argument imho.
Lovely news! 🙂
I suspect the renewal rates on subsequent releases won’t be any better on average. If you look at a chart on ntldstatss they all follow mostly the same trend up. The numbers are different obviously but the charts are all much the same. Is it really going to be any different on the way down for most of these? I suspect a tld with 1000 reges won’t do much different to one with 50,000 as an average, i.e. they might lose 40% in the first year.
As far a speculation goes, they all had a lot of that especially at the start, it is just the volumes that are different.
You cant get 20 bucks for a high quality domain on any popular domain forum.
When registering a new domain multiple registrations creating auctions are filled with hot air with domains that never launch doubt they even if they sold to anyone and most likely fictional characters created by the registry itself and omg and registries with pre-register madness ripoff blatant fail, Ridiculous pricing and capitalizing on early birds the domain market took a turn for the worst, Expect more domainers to be holding the bag and dropping hot names because they cant make up the cost for renewal let alone sell any for decent amounts. poor rubbish