Total with sunrise and landrush now tops 21,000.
19,035 domain names were registered during the first 24 hours of general availability, the registry confirmed to Domain Name Wire.
That makes a total of 21,115 registrations including sunrise and landrush.
The numbers would be higher if the registry hadn’t held back so many domain names, including all three-letter and shorter domain options.
I think .blog will have steady growth once it’s fully integrated into the WordPress.com blog creation path.
For more on .blog, listen to my podcast interview with WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg.
Automattic is not going to do 250,000 registrations before the end of the year.
Pretty good, they paid $19M, and barely cracked the top 100 gtld count, it is absolutely horrible, it is what people get terminated over in their jobs
EPICFAILURE.BLOG
This is a telling stat, especially because the vast majority of the online world know both the term (blog) and have experience with their application, i.e., they regularly visit blogs.
Yet only 21k .Blog domains were registered – despite ‘blog’ being a widespread term with nearly endless potential use-cases.
Yet in the first 24 hours there were 167k registrations for .VIP – and over 500,000 have been registered in the past 6 months, even though its a purely niche extension.
So the one conclusion to be drawn is that China obviouly has very little interest in .Blog.
The folks at .BLOG chose just about the worst time to launch this TLD from a publicity standpoint, competing for attention first with a presidential election and now with Thanksgiving travel.
Crazy pricing didn’t help none neither.
Interesting stats. Probably a slow start but there’s a lot of potential for the .blog TLD
No, a .com is needed to be taken seriously on the internet.
Meanwhile in my neck of the woods, .com is few and far between
I suspect that of the 19,035 about 35 of them may actually be real. The other 19,000 I believe are registry insiders pumping the numbers to trick suckers into believing that people are interested in new gtlds. They clearly are not and this will reveal itself shortly, if not obvious already.
Interesting idea. No one has ever done that with a new gtld before (snicker, snicker). I agree with you and do not see any redeeming value to the new extensions.
@Yo Gee,
Not at all likely. If the registry wanted to inflate the numbers, then they would have gone bigger.
When you rob a bank, you don’t ask for $50. And when you fake registrations, you don’t aim for 19,000; you aim for 1 million.
High prices and reserved domains are obstacles to big registration numbers, whether manufactured or real.
What is the population of China now? 1.4 Billion?
What is the population of USA now? 325 Million?
Looks like the success of any new gTLD is linked to how it is favored by the Chinese. .top, .vip, .xyz look to be favorites. Catering to the Chinese taste for new gTLD extensions has to be a serious marketing element for achieving success.
I can not claim any authoritative basis for any aspect of domaining, but one distasteful part of the roll out of the new gTLDs since mid 2014 is the absolute lack of uniformity in pricing.
Credibility is tossed out the window for the whole new gTLD platform when one extension is reserving huge swaths of names to be sold at a future date at a premium while another extension advertises names for $1. Everyone loses.
When in comes to the aftermarket, new gTLD registrars are in direct competition with their registrants! The conflict of interest is palpable.
What .blog has done is, prior to the General Availability phase for registration, taken a vast majority of names that were pre-ordered that were not priced at a premium, designated them as premium, made them unavailable to the people who pre-ordered and then jacked up the prices with premium prices. They mined the pre-order names, why? Because they could.
No regulation.
The culture of the “Wild Wild West” is the rationale and ICANN is complicit.
The glaring irregularities and blatant dishonesty will serve to contribute, sadly, to the demise of most of the new gTLD offerings, GREED!
.blog should be at least be as big as .club! I think .blog had or has, what the hell do I know, to be bigger and better than .club. I feel it is a better, more broadly appealing name and given realistic registration costs could and should be, but it looks like they have shot themselves in the foot with dishonesty and ridiculous premium registration costs.
Robert McLean
“What is the population of China now? 1.4 Billion?
What is the population of USA now? 325 Million?
Looks like the success of any new gTLD is linked to how it is favored by the Chinese. .top, .vip, .xyz look to be favorites. Catering to the Chinese taste for new gTLD extensions has to be a serious marketing element for achieving success.”
Excellent summary…which really sums it all up.
Just another .crapolla gtld
very true… you mean another .wtf
Why is it so appealing to use a branded domain like .blog? dosent .COM, .NET appear ore ‘premium’ the more personalized domain extension go to market?