The namespace still has 380,000 domains.
Google’s .app domain name entered general availability on May 8, 2018. It immediately took off with 100,000 domains registered almost immediately and 180,000 domains under management within a couple of days.
There are now 180,000 .app domain names and rising!
— Ben McIlwain (@CydeWeys) May 10, 2018
These early registrations came up for renewal in May this year. The first anniversary of a domain launch is often called “the junk drop”. People who got a bit too excited at launch drop their marginal domains.
In the case of .app, it took a while to see the impact of this. It takes up to 80 days for .app domains to work through the deletion process: up to 45 days of autorenew grace, then a 30 day redemption grace period followed by 5 days of pending delete.
The .app namespace continued to grow up until July 13, according to nTLDStats. Then the early domains started to drop and the zone shrunk, but it hasn’t been too bad.
nTLDstats shows that the namespace peaked at 446,730 domains on July 12. It is now 381,195. (There are fewer domains in the zone file, but nTLD stats estimates domains that don’t have nameservers.)
Based on these data, the namespace has lost over 65,000 domains. New domains have been registered during this period that offset some of the losses.
Ben McIlwain of Google Registry told Domain Name Wire:
We are happy with .app’s strong renewal rates. This validates our belief that customers are interested in new TLDs, and in the case of .app especially as meaningful, functional and more secure gateways to the internet. We look forward to seeing more developers building on .app.
.app is doing relatively well.
If you want to see what a dying nTLD looks like, take a look at .loan 🙂
Isn’t in ironic that the ntld situation has got so bad that “declines” are now seen as doing “relatively well” compared because other extensions have completely cratered.
The extension is dead, interest in apps is fading and who wants to be solely seen as an app?
The drop is numbers is quite high given these names weren’t discounted. What really shows is no take-up of the dropped names. The numbers will keep dropping over time in my view.
This TLD is for apps. An app can of course be solely seen as an app. I see no problems with that.
Please desist from asserting “this is dead”, “that is dead”, etc just because they haven’t taken off or you don’t like them.
@snoopy1267 .com investor spotted. Please ignore the troll, .app is doing very, very well actually. It’s great not only for apps and websites, but for a modern company name as well. Google also announced its plans to make every app web-based (so developers don’t have to develop their code for multiple platforms) and that means that every app will need to have a domain name. Great!
Snoopy, as always being an idiot.
It may be that we USA the .app does not have a registration demand, however it can be used by anyone in any country.
I once read a comment with false information by Snoopy about domain preference in Brazil.
He insisted that Brazilians like .com more than .com.br, until Rubens Kuhl from NIC.BR had to show a research done, showing that Brazilians prefer .com.br!
Returning to the subject, in Brazil, for example, almost 68% of the population accesses the Internet via smartphones or tablets.
Most Brazilians who use the Internet access apps or mobile sites.
In Brazil, the .app is important because the Brazilian people love apps, especially social networks, banks and fintechs, messengers and video.
Snoopy, you may like .com, but you shouldn’t force people to like and believe in your tastes and thoughts.
Around 65% renewals for first part of the land rush and 61% for the second month. The numbers are still stabilising though. There is also a significant percentage of Chinese registrations and that market tends to be quite volatile and have lower renewal rates. The problem with some of the new gTLDs is that the real attrition starts with the second anniversary. The third anniversary is the Hold’em or Fold’em decision where registrants have to decide whether to renew or drop undeveloped domain names. The .APP is a kind of accessory TLD rather than a stand-alone gTLD at the moment.
All the ex-Famous Four Media NGTs are in decline due to the new management’s decision to increase wholesale renewal fees last year. Most of the registration volume in those NGTs were driven by discounted registrations. Those registrations do not renew well because the renewal fee is generally at full fee. It is cheaper for to drop the domain name and register a new one. This does attract some problematic content and there has been a shift in spam rates from Legacy gTLDs to the NGTs using heavy discounting.
The .APP is very much an aspirational “If you build it, they will come” kind of TLD. It has a rationale that makes sense to Techies but the registry has not done a good job of selling it to the public.
just a bunch of Google.crapp
It’s on the rise temporarily and I personally love the extension but I honestly don’t think it will survive on the long run as the registry isn’t helping hands to make it a sell out domain extension.
Junk drop recovered for .app