Which domains have outperformed and underperformed my expectations?
It’s been nearly three years since new top level domain names started rolling off of the DNS printing press. A lot of people made bad predictions about how TLDs would do in general, and a lot of people over or underestimated particularly strings.
Include me in the camp that’s surprised by the relative success and failure of certain strings. Here are some.
Outperformed
These are strings that are doing better than I expected them to.
.XYZ – I’m not looking at raw numbers here. I think all readers understand the pricing mechanisms at play that sent .XYZ to over 6.5 million domains. But here’s what impresses me about .XYZ…going in, I thought this had little chance. XYZ is hard to type on your keyboard, it’s three syllables, it doesn’t really mean anything, and I thought that other generics like .online and .site would be more appealing to users. What I didn’t think about is how it’s nearly impossible to brand something like .site. It’s too generic. XYZ has turned .xyz into a brand and has attracted big names I would have never expected to set up a site on .xyz.
.Cloud – Don’t get me wrong here. The cloud business is huge right now. But I suspected .cloud would be a high price, low volume business. Instead, .Cloud is a low price, high volume domain with over 80,000 registrations.
.Guru – First mover advantage? Absolutely. But people keep renewing their .guru domains. It has about 60,000 in the zone.
.Live – It was hard to predict several years ago that live streaming and video would take off like it has. Rightside has done a good job branding .Live for that market, and has marketed it wisely. It has nearly 75,000 names in the zone.
Underperformed
I remember having a conversation with someone before new TLDs came out. I suggested we’d be counting most TLD registrations in the tens of thousands. He said hundreds of thousands. It turns out thousands was better. Keeping the overall numbers aside, here are some that I’m surprised have done as poorly as they have.
.Republican & .Democrat – These names came out with a thud. Since neither of them mustered even 1,000 total names through a presidential election year, I’d say these don’t have much of a chance.
.Sucks – Brands were worried about having to protect themselves in .sucks. They rightfully argued that the registry was trying to blackmail them into registering their brands by offering lower pricing to people who would set up gripe sites. It turns out it doesn’t really matter; there are about 7,500 names in the zone. This might be a good business if most of the registrations are at $200, but the domain has not really caught on after the initial press.
.CEO – OK, I’m just kidding. If anything, this domain has outperformed my expectations at nearly 3,000 in the zone.
Pete says
I think VIP with over half a million paid regs in six months is worthy of a mention.
Andrew Allemann says
Good point. I like that one and the Chinese uptake was more than I expected.
yun yang says
.vip , .top and .xyz are allowed by the Chinese authorities, so that’s the reason they’re popular
Andrew Allemann says
.VIP and .XYZ just got that approval a couple weeks ago, so I don’t think that has much to do with it. That said, these two domains are very popular in China.
EnCirca (@EnCirca) says
I think the number of units is a false metric, since they are easily goosed.
If you consider value proposition and revenue, .BANK needs to be on the list.
Andrew Allemann says
They are easily goosed, but I think only one of these is goosed in terms of cheap registrations. And i mentioned that one
Jane Doe says
.kiwi just had its feathers fluffed with the addition of 170,000 or so domains thrown onto its numbers
Jothan Frakes says
.Cloud I credit this registry with having Francesco Cetraro at the helm to drive that business unit – many of the registries that are doing well are the ones that hired veterans with experience in the field.
Mark Thorpe says
Like Rick Schwartz said, .Web will suck the air out of the room from new gTLDs.
.Club and .XYZ will survive, but won’t compete with .Web, but with each other instead, like they do right now.
.Club is the better choice of the two. IMO
Anon says
71% of new domains are parked according to NtldStats Andrew. Numbers rising each day.
Jovenet Consulting says
While tracking daily new domain name registration volumes, I noticed that some TLDs have kept increasing since day 1 of their launch. I call this a performance. In fact, it is rare that no TLD sees a decrease from a week to the other. It is the case for .FILM – .CLUB – .ISTANBUL – .KYOTO – .LAW – .SITE – .WORLD – .BLOG some from the “Generics” new gTLD report (http://www.jovenet.consulting/reports/company) – .TRADE, etc…
They are not so many…
Bartles says
I see dead people. There is no purpose for new gtlds. They are a waste and are all sure to die shortly. Just my $.02
Eric Lyon says
.Sucks was/is just a joke. I never really could wrap my head around any other business model for it except to force/extort companies to protect their brand names.
Duke Duyck says
I don’t trust any of these TLDs. I bought one a year ago, and it was not recognized by Yahoo as a valid email address. This means that I still cannot send email, because my provider, Rogers, insists that I get it validated by Yahoo before they will let me use their SMTP for it.
I can receive email at RSC-president@roncy.rocks, but I cannot send email from it.
I have contacted The domain name sellers at various levels, who say it is up to the provider who says that it is not their problem if these TLDs are not compatible.
Is there anybody in this world who can help me out?
A Mitchell says
Yahoo email won’t recognize .TEL, which has been around for years, so it follows that Yahoo would also not handle nTLDs. Gmail works like a charm, but without being able to send email to and from Yahoo accounts, a TLD becomes less attractive.
Sounds like an industry problem that needs an industry-wide solution.