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Rightside new gTLD renewals can top 80%

Kevin Murphy, October 14, 2016, 08:34:44 (UTC), Domain Registries

Rightside says it is seeing encouraging renewal figures from its oldest batch of new gTLDs.
The company this week revealed that renewals after two years of ownership on average stand at 81%.
In a blog post, Rightside broke out some numbers for .dance, .democrat, .ninja, .immobilien, .social, .reviews and .futbol.
Those seven are the only ones in its portfolio to have gone through two full renewal cycles.
The renewal rate after year one was a modest 69% — in other words it lost almost a third of its installed base after 12 months — but this increased to 81% after the second year.
The actual number of domains involved in quite tiny — 81% equates to just 21,000 names across all seven TLDs.
Breaking out a couple of TLDs, Rightside wrote:

Our first gTLD to market, .DANCE, saw a 70% renewal rate in year one expand to 83% in year two for that same subset of domains. Our best performing gTLD of the seven is .IMMOBILIEN, which renewed at 83% in its first year, and grew to a stupendous 87% in its second—which certainly makes sense given the permanent nature of real estate.

But Rightside reckons the numbers reflect well on the new gTLD industry. It said:

domain investors with portfolios including new gTLDs recognize the long-term value of these domain names, and rather than let them drop after the first year, are holding onto them to find the right buyer continue to earn parking revenue. Second—and likely the more significant driver—is that end users are actually picking up these domain names and putting them to use.

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Comments (2)

  1. Adam says:
    October 14, 2016 at 10:50 am

    It is ridiculous to claim high renewal rates when you TLD has few domains registered.
    More new registry shenanigans.

    Reply
  2. Potential Domain Sales says:
    November 9, 2016 at 4:49 pm

    “domain investors with portfolios including new gTLDs recognize the long-term value of these domain names, and rather than let them drop after the first year, are holding onto them to find the right buyer continue to earn parking revenue.”
    What a misleading statement by Rightside, have to admit.
    We don’t recognize and cannot yet see any long-term value in new gTLDs. The high cost of registering and holding these new TLDs, lack of marketing, uncertainties and lack of adoption; makes investing in new gTLDs a very risky venture.
    Moreover, Rightside’s Name.com registrar, recently refuse to provide us investor discount on most of the company’s TLDs (and others), unless we initially register 10 or more domains per TLD at the standard cost ranging from mostly $25 to $35 which is absurdly high and makes no investable sense.
    The livelihood of Rightside as a company relies solely on their successful execution of their new gtlds business strategy, according to their financials; in which apparently they aren’t doing so well at.

    Reply

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