Recent Posts
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Was I wrong? .xyz claims 31,000 regs on day one
.xyz’s first full day of general availability saw it total 31,119 registrations, suggesting that it’s not doing as badly as I suggested in a post earlier today.
Today’s .xyz zone file shows 14,924 names, up 14,829 on the day, but Gavin Brown, CTO of .xyz back-end CentralNic, just commented that the 24-hour number is actually 31,119.
The zone files for each new gTLD are made available by ICANN — assuming the Centralized Zone Data Service is working — at 0100 UTC every day. Brown said that .xyz’s file today was generated an hour later.
That means the 14,924 total represented the first 10 hours of GA, as indicated in my original piece today.
For a new gTLD to sell more domains in the second half of its first GA day than during the first is unusual, because gTLD launches to date have tended to rely quite heavily on pre-orders.
Pre-orders, a decent measure of demand, generally hit the registry within the first few minutes of general availability, as registrars try to secure the names their customers want.
That has the effect of stacking first-day registrations heavily towards the first few hours of GA.
Take .club, for example. It sold 25,776 names in its first 10 hours. But 24 hours later that number had crept up to just 30,680, an increase of just 4,904.
Similarly, TLD Registry’s .在线 moved just shy of 20,000 names in its first 12 hours of general availability, but had sold only 1,000 more names a full 24 hours later.
I didn’t think it unreasonable to assume that .xyz would follow the same pattern, but this front-loading doesn’t seem to have happened in .xyz’s case.
Did I make a faulty assumption?
If registrations are indeed coming in at a more measured pace than preceding launches, then .xyz may not be falling behind CEO Daniel Negari’s aggressive growth targets at all.
Was I wrong to say that .xyz hasn’t lived up to the hype? Maybe. We’ll need some more days of data to be sure.
You were not wrong.
Total spin
On TheDomains.com in one of the comments, a poster suggested that there freebie domains given to NSI registrants. This would explain why NSI had a disproportionate number of registrations (and most under privacy protection).
It’d be nice to get confirmation from the registry operator (and/or NSI) whether there were indeed freebies.
Fact is that a large amount of the domain names registered through NSI are outright nonsense. If these domains are not outright fakes, it’s quite likely they were given away for free.
There’s definitely something weird going on.
Lots of gibberish names registered via NetSol’s privacy, where the name on the Whois record matches the name of the matching .com, and the matching .com *seems* to be some kind of Chinese op using misappropriated identities.
I’ve been unable to determine whether it’s statistically significant, however. There seem to be plenty of legit regs via NetSol with privacy too.
If they were given away for free, and set to “auto renew”, NSI will have a PR disaster in a year, as probably many customers won’t want to be charged for something that they had to “opt out” of via an email they might have missed.
What happend to the 7K private registrations at Network Solutions, was that Warren Buffet registering .xyz? Network Solutions has very little percentage across the board, any smart domainer would not put 2 feet on the ground there, this does not add up, take what you want from it, but nobody is this stupid.
9eshiboyulecheng.xyz
Why are people registering domains like this?
Matching .com was created this April 2…
Whole lot more like that.
Seems that nearly 27,500 of the 38,000 .xyz domains currently registered are Network Solutions freebies, so the real “genuine demand” registrations are actually 10,500.
Source?
http://ntldstats.com/tld/xyz
Scroll down to “.xyz breakdown”
See also posts on The Domains with the freebie e-mails some registrants got.