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All eyes on Donuts as first new gTLD renewal figures roll in

Kevin Murphy, March 23, 2015, 10:44:22 (UTC), Domain Registries

Donuts is about to give the world the clearest picture yet of the ongoing demand for new gTLD domain names.
The company has taken the unprecedented decision to disclose its renewal figures on a pretty much live basis.
COO Richard Tindal has been blogging renewal stats for .bike, .clothing, .guru, .ventures, .holdings, .plumbing and .singles for the last few days.
Those were the first seven of its gTLDs to hit general availability.
To Saturday, the renewal status of 6,352 names in these gTLDs was known and the renewal rate was 85.3%.
However, that rate is boosted by the relatively high proportion of the names that were registered during sunrise periods.
Donuts said that “two thirds” of the 6,352 reported domains were registered after sunrise.
That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, given that Donuts has previously put the total number of sunrise regs across the seven TLDs at just 1,404, which would work out at about 22%, not 33%.
On Friday, the company had said that the status of 4,534 names was known and the renewal rate was 91.6%.
If you deduct the Friday numbers from the Saturday numbers, you get to 1,265 renewals and 553 drops, a renewal rate of almost 69.6% for that particular day.
That number, which is a few percentage points off what a gTLD such as .com regularly reports, could of course fluctuate.
The full-year renewal rate, which would factor out much of the domainer activity, of course won’t be known for another year.
Donuts said it expects its renewal rate to drop to the mid-70s in its next daily report, expected today, which will cover an additional 22,910 domains.
The company’s decision to blog its numbers comes a day or two after we reported that ICANN is only budgeting for renewals of 50%.
The 14.6% of names not renewed works out to about 933 domains.
“We believe most of those names will be re-registered by another party within the next 35 days,” Tindal wrote.
As they were all registered in the early days of GA, one might expect them to be of a reasonably high quality.
While GA began at the end of January 2014, renewal rates are not known until the Auto-Renew Grace Period, which can be as long as 45 days, has expired.



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Comments (1)

  1. Tom says:

    Most were stupid speculative, I want a piece of the action purchase, most to be renewed, when there were only 3 options compared to 500, going onto
    1000 doesn’t seem likely.

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