A look at .live

.Live is faring well as live online content becomes more popular. Let’s dig in.

Today, Donuts issued a press release remarking on the growth of its .live top level domain name. .Live is Donuts’ largest new top level domain based on domains under management (DUMs), which are up about 30% since the start of the year.

Let’s dig into the data to see how .live is doing.

Growth and Domains Under Management 

First, let’s look at the domain counts at nTLDStats dating to late 2015:

The domain had steady growth leading into June 2019, at which point DUMs lurched up by a couple of hundred thousand within weeks. This was likely due to new promotion strategies and discount pricing.

Indeed, Donuts prices .live with a very low first-year price and a modest renewal. You can register a .live for $1.99 at GoDaddy right now for the first year, only to pay $39.99 per year after that. Based on data at a couple of registrars and how they typically price domains, promotional first-year wholesale costs are probably around $1, and renewal prices are about $16-$17.

The 2019 surge gave way to the inevitable 2020 drop when domains came up for renewal. Since January of this year, the domain has shown steady growth.

nTLDStats reports that the top registrars are GoDaddy, Namecheap, Enom, NameSilo, and Name.com. Donuts owns Name.com. The domain has a reasonably healthy distribution among registrars.

Usage

Anecdotally, it seems that .live has done well with live streamers and similar influencers. It’s a good domain name for anyone streaming or producing video content.

Pandalytics, a DomainsBot service that tracks domain usage, calculates that about 53,000 .live domains are developed. Analytics services like Pandalytics use varying data methodologies and they rarely match each other. But it’s helpful to compare .live to the domains directly above and below it in nTLDStats’ DUM rankings: .work and .bar. Both .work and .bar have similar first-year pricing strategies.

.Work has about the same number of registered domains as .live, and Pandalytics calculates roughly 58,000 are developed.

.Bar has about 100,000 fewer domains, and Pandlytics counts only 5,000 developed domains.

Some people register .live domains to redirect them to pages on streaming and video platforms, which also shows up in the numbers. Pandalytics calculates 30,000 .live redirects, compared to 21,000 for .work and 16,000 for .bar. (Of course, not all redirects are to active sites. Many of them are to parked pages and for-sale landers.)

Aftermarket 

Donuts uses a high-high model for pricing premium .live domains. This means people who register domains Donuts labeled as premium pay a higher price for the initial registration and subsequent renewals. This makes it difficult for domain investors to acquire domains for resale.

When Rightside (later acquired by Donuts) launched .live, it quickly sold some of the best premiums. In 2016 it sold sex .live for $160,000 and porn .live for $120,000. Both of these domains are currently listed for sale.

Rightside also sold stream.live for $20,000. Stream.live currently forwards to theq.live, a live streaming platform. It also sold church.live for $20,000 and Phoenix-area mega-church Gateway Church uses the domain name.

More recently, c.live sold for $28,500 on Sedo last year and is used by a live streaming app.

You can still get good .live domains on the aftermarket for reasonable prices: tech.live sold for only $560 in March. But don’t forget premium renewals on most of the good domains.

You can see recent sales at NameBio.

Takeaways

.Live is Donuts’ biggest new TLD. Donuts uses low teaser prices for the first year, and this has spurred lots of first-year creates. Many of these domains renew and .live has reasonable levels of usage. The domain seems to be faring well during the pandemic as live video takes center stage.