A deep dive into how .London and .NYC are being used.
The .London and .NYC top level domain names were both launched last year and have risen to the top of new TLD leaderboards. .London currently has about 60,000 registrations and .NYC has topped 75,000 in the zone file.
Does that mean .NYC is “beating” .London?
It’s interesting to compare the two domains. Both are world cities and major financial centers. Yet there’s a big difference in eligibility for these domains. Anyone can register a .London domain; .NYC is restricted to residents and business owners in the city. And once you dig deep into how the domains are being used, there are a number of ways to judge their success.
Dataprovider provided Domain Name Wire with data to get a more granular look at these two domains. Its data was eye-opening.
Dataprovider has crawled the majority of .London and .NYC domains to find out how they’re being used. Here are some of the more interesting findings, which are perhaps new ways to look at the relative success of a new TLD.
(In all of these graphs, .London is on the left and .NYC is on the right.)
Reachable
What happens when you try to visit a site on these new TLDs? Most resolve, but a lot are unreachable. A good portion of .NYC domains are forwarded.
Copyright Dates
Dataprovider found a little over 10,000 sites on .London and .NYC that include a copyright notice on the site. Since both of these TLDs came out in 2014, you’d expect no copyright notices with dates prior to that. But that’s not the case:
2013? 2010? How is that possible?
Well, it turns out this can be an interesting data point for new TLDs. It seems that a lot of site owners have ported an existing site to a new top level domain. They kept the old copyright date intact. In other cases, people have forwarded the domains to an existing site that has the old copyright date.
Contactable
Businesses use websites to generate business, right? Here’s an interesting metric looking at how many sites on .London (left) and .NYC (right) have contact information, and which type. .London seems to be winning this.
Social Media
The presence of social media accounts on a site also show some sort of usage. Take a look at how well .London is doing with regards to this.
Hosting Country
Not surprisingly, UK hosting providers are hosting the majority of .London sites and US for .NYC. Ireland is also playing a role in .London hosting along with the U.S.
SSL and CMS
The presence of an SSL certificate or usage of a content management system also bode well for a new top level domain name.
Dataprovider found 1,152 .London sites with an SSL and 120 .NYC sites. Keep in mind that the domains could be forwarding to another site that has the SSL certificate.
About 2,650 .London sites have WordPress installed. That’s a good sign. 1,630 .NYC sites have WordPress. A bunch of .NYC sites are using the Sitefinity CMS.
Those are very useful metrics. Hopefully someone will come along and compile similar data on an ongoing basis for the wider spectrum of TLDs.
Yes, please.
http://www.dataprovider.com is your source!
Wow what an interesting post. It’s incredible how these new variations of domain names are being used. I wonder if some of the big brands will think about taking these domain names regardless of whether they use them or not so that they protect their customers from phishing sites.