.Shop soars with 40,000 registrations in first 30 minutes

High demand for new .shop top level domain name.

GMO Registry launched the .shop top level domain name yesterday and the early results are impressive.

39,801 .shop domain names were registered within the first 30 minutes and 45,427 within the first two hours.

.Shop now has over 50,000 registrations including about 5,000 domains registered in Early Access and 1,000 in sunrise.

It’s certainly a great start, but GMO has a big hill to climb. It paid $41.5 million in an auction for rights to the name.

GMO Registry CEO Hiro Tsukahara explained why his company paid so much for the domain name in DNW Podcast #102.

I’ll be curious to see what renewal rates are for these .shop domain names a year from now. Registrars offered heavy discounts for first-year registrations on .shop.