Google launches .dev with some big-name anchor tenants

Google is bringing .dev to general availability this week, and it’s already signed up some recognizable brands as anchor tenants.
Salesforce.com, GitHub and Cloudflare are among several outfits that have already developed web sites using pre-launch .dev domains granted to them by Google Registry.
Salesforce is offering developer tools at the catch crm.dev, GitHub is running a spin-off tool at github.dev and Cloudflare has workers.dev.
All are developed sites, among many more highlighted by Google’s “chief domain enthusiast” Ben Fried in a blog post yesterday.
Sites targeting female coders and offering advice on accessibility issues have also been launched.
.dev appears to have attracted over 500 registrations during its pre-launch periods, including sunrise.
Yesterday, it entered its Early Access Period, a week in which early birds can acquire .dev domains for a premium fee.
From five figures yesterday, prices decrease each day until they hit their .com-equivalent regular pricing on February 28.

Over 50,000 names sold as .shop has successful launch day

GMO Registry has recorded one of the most successful new gTLD launch days to date, selling over 45,000 .shop domain names in the first hours.
The company said it sold 45,427 .shop names in the first two hours after general availability started yesterday afternoon at about 1600 UTC.
The total at that point was 51,755, including about 5,000 that were registered during the Early Access Period, during which names carried higher prices.
The latest .shop zone file contains 46,419 domains.
The registry had sold 616 premium-priced names already, GMO said.
The volume is quite impressive given the retail price tags — .shop is not priced for budget Chinese domainers, it’s selling for $20 to $30 at the major Western registrars.
That’s double, triple or even 10 times as much as Minds + Machines’ self-consciously ‘non-freenium’ .vip domains were selling for when it racked up a six-figure volume during its first day of GA earlier this year.
West.cn, the leading Chinese new gTLD registrar, priced .vip at $3 but is selling .shop at $25.
GMO paid a then record-setting $41.5 million for the rights to .shop at an ICANN auction back in January.

Radix targets a million .online names in 2-3 years

Having just finished the most-successful new gTLD launch day to date, Radix Registry reckons it can get .online to seven figures in two to three years.
“We’re at 37,170 names as of an hour ago,” Radix CEO Bhavin Turakhia told DI at about 1000 UTC this morning.
That represents less than a full day of general availability. The company said last night that 28,000 names were registered in the first 30 minutes.
UPDATE: At the 24-hour mark, Radix tweeted this:

What an exciting Day 1 it has been for .online! Total DUMs 24 hours into the GA is 39,449 #newgTLDs #domaining

— Radix (@RadixRegistry) August 27, 2015

That beats .club’s 25,000-ish, which was Radix’s publicly stated goal, but it also tops .berlin’s 31,000 first-day names.
The CEOs of both these rival registries had publicly predicted their positions would be toppled and actively encouraged Radix to claim the crown.
Turakhia said that the majority of names registered came from pre-orders, largely at 1&1.
“Fourteen thousand names came from 1&1, 6,000 from Go Daddy, 2,700 from United Domains, 1,900 from Name.com and 1,400 from Tucows,” he said, partially breaking down the 37,170 figure by registrar.
He said the goal is to have a .online zone measured in the millions of names.
“I estimate that we should be able to get to a million names in a period of two to three years,” he said. “That’s on a conservative basis.”
Depending on how you count domains, .xyz may have already been the first to hit one million. Its zone never got as high as a million names, but it may have briefly crossed a million in terms of domains under management earlier this year.
At auction, .online sold for what is believed to be an eight-figure sum, originally to a joint venture of Radix, Tucows and Namecheap.
Radix bought out its partners earlier this year.
That was an increase in risk exposure Radix business head Sandeep Ramchandani said made him nervous. He said launch day’s numbers show .online’s potential.
Turahkhia said that there are 680,000 names in the .com zone that end in “online” today, and a million that have “online” somewhere in the second level, showing that the string is desirable to registrants.
Radix said last night that its Early Access Period — during which names are sold for a higher price — ended with 1,130 sales.
Turahkhia said that of these, about 1,000 were registered in the last three days, during which time the price was $100. Regular .online pricing is around the same as .com ($14.99 at 1&1 and Go Daddy), but some registrars are selling for as much at $50.

Radix targets 25,000 names for .online’s first day

Radix Registry reckons .online will move at least 15,000 domains in its first day of general availability, but it’s aiming higher.
“We are confident .online will be amongst the biggest new gTLDs that have launched,” Radix business head Sandeep Ramchandani said in a press release today.
“The same sentiment across several Registrar Partners has reinforced our beliefs. We expect to start off with at least 15,000 registrations at launch and would love to break .club’s launch record,” he said.
When .CLUB Domains launched .club in 2014, its zone file showed over 25,000 domains after the first 10 hours.
Radix is basing its projections not only on its registrar conversations, but also on .online’s sunrise period, which ended yesterday with 775 sales.
That number is of course low by pre-2012 standards, but it’s in the top tier of sunrise periods for non-controversial new gTLDs.
The only strings to top 1,000 names to date have been ICM Registry’s .porn and .adult and Vox Populi’s .sucks.
.CLUB’s sunrise weighed in at 454 domains.
Radix had better hope .online is successful — the gTLD sold for seven or eight figures at private auction.
The gTLD will go to its Early Access Period tomorrow before settling down to regular pricing August 26.

Yeehaw! Bumper crop of new gTLD launches

There’s a definite wild west flavor to today’s crop of new gTLD launches, in a week which sees no fewer than 16 strings hit general availability.
Kicking off the week, today Minds + Machines brings its first wholly-owned TLDs to market.
Following the successful launch of .london, for which M+M acts as the back-end, last week, today we see the launch of the less exciting .cooking, .country, .fishing, .horse, .rodeo, and .vodka.
Afilias’ rural-themed .organic also goes to GA today.
As does .vegas, an oddity in the geo-gTLD space as it’s a city pretty much synonymous with one vertical market, gambling. Or three vertical markets, if you include booze and prostitution.
.vegas names do not require a local presence, so I’m expecting to see gambling businesses the world over attempt to capitalize on the Vegas brand regardless of their location.
A second batch of launches is due on Wednesday September 17.
Sticking with the wild west theme, RightSide’s .republican is due to go first-come, first-served.
With a somewhat more eastern flavor, Radix Registry’s first new gTLDs — .website, .press and .host — all hit GA on the same day.
Donuts’ .loans, .life, .guide and .church all enter their standard-pricing phases, while .place and .direct enter their premium-priced Early Access Period on Wednesday too.

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.

.xyz fails to live up to the hype

.xyz sold just shy of 15,000 domain names during its first hours of general availability.
That’s according to zone files released today.
The registry added 14,829 names yesterday, ending the period with 14,924 in its zone, making it the 15th-largest new gTLD by volume, behind the likes of .center, .directory and .solutions.
(UPDATE: see the bottom of this post for important updates on these numbers.)
While it’s a respectable first-day performance — logging more sales that I expected it to — it’s doesn’t look like the registry is going to hit CEO Daniel Negari’s target of a million names in year one.
Earlier this week, Negari enthusiastically blogged, in a post tagged simply “believe”:

There is no doubt in my mind that the growth rate of .xyz will surpass the growth rate of .com. It won’t take us 20 years to reach one million registrations. It will only take 1 year. The growing number of internet users online today, the increasing demand for domain name registrations, and the way we have positioned .xyz all validate this projection. Soon we will see that there is only one competitor to .com, and that is .xyz.

Averaged out over a year, a million registrations is over 2,700 per day, a rate that no other new gTLD registry has managed to sustain to date.
If .xyz follows the path taken by its predecessors, it will probably rack up a thousand or so more names per day for the next few days, likely making it a top-ten new gTLD within a week, before settling down to a comfortable rate of 200 to 300 per day.
So far, .guru (four months old) and .club (one month old) are the only gTLDs with significant volumes that have managed to double their launch-day figures.
.xyz is going to be in desperate need of some more marketing if its wants to get to one million by June 2, 2015.
As I’ve always said, I think .xyz is a tough sell.
As Negari says, the string has “little-to-no meaning”, and the game has always been to brand .xyz as being even more generic than .com.
The registry has attempted to shoehorn it into meanings such as “It is the ending of the alphabet, and it is the ending of domain names” and “Generations X, Y and Z”.
But it seems to be one of those sales pitches you either get or you don’t. I’ve heard it many times, and I still don’t.
So 15,000 names in half a day, by my expectations, is not bad.
However, despite the 15,000 names, we’re talking about a TLD with a sub-.com registry fee, being retailed by some registrars for under $10.
With a million names, that’s a nice little business. Sub-100,000, not so much.
There are plenty of people out there who will immediately say the “success” of new gTLDs in general is a combination of many factors, of which volume is only one, and I agree.
It’s only day one for .xyz, but for a cheap-as-chips gTLD that has explicitly made itself a volume play, I think registration count is a fair way to measure its success going forward.
UPDATE: According to Gavin Brown, CTO of .xyz back-end CentralNic, the number of names in the zone file almost 24 hours after GA began is actually 31,119, over double what the registry sold in the first 10 hours.

Slow start for .ceo with fewer than 400 names sold

The new .ceo gTLD has had a disappointing launch.
In the first 30 hours of general availability, which began on Friday afternoon, the TLD has managed to scrape just 378 registrations, according to the latest zone file.
That includes 100 names that were registered during the sunrise period.
Jodee Rich, CEO of PeopleBrowsr, the .ceo registry, told DI that the company sold about 40 premium names at $999 per year on the first day and that revenue for the first six hours was about $100,000.
The baseline retail price for .ceo names is $99.
There is a tiered pricing structure, and Rich said that only four out of its 40-something accredited registrars were ready to handle it, which may have impacted sales.
He added that .ceo has over 3,000 pre-registrations which he hopes to start seeing convert over the coming days.
Nevertheless, 378 domains is a poor showing by any measure.
On day one of GA, it was the eighth-fastest growing new gTLD by domain volume. Today, it’s ranked 52nd out of the 52 new gTLDs that have gone to full, baseline pricing general availability.

Registrars screwing up new gTLD launches?

Some of the largest domain name registrars are failing to support new gTLDs properly, leading to would-be registrants being told unregistered names are unavailable.
The .menu gTLD went into general availability yesterday, gathering some 1,649 registrations in its first half day.
It’s not a great start for the new gTLD by any stretch, but how much of it has to do with the channel?
I tested out searches for available names at some of the biggest registrars and got widely different results, apparently because they don’t all properly support tiered pricing.
Market leader Go Daddy even refuses to sell available names.
The .menu gTLD is being operated by a What Box? subsidiary, the inappropriately named Wedding TLD2.
The company has selected at least three pricing tiers as far as I can tell — $25 is the baseline registry fee, but many unreserved “premium” names are priced by the registry at $50 and $65 a year.
For my test, I used noodleshop.menu, which seems to carry the $65 fee. Whois records show it as unregistered and it’s not showing up in today’s .menu zone file. It’s available.
This pricing seems to be accurately reflected at registrars including Name.com and 101domain.
Name.com, for example, says that the name is available and offers to sell it to me for $81.25.

Likewise, 101domain reports its availability and a price of $97.49. There’s even a little medal icon next to the name to illustrate the fact that it’s at a premium price.

So far so good. However, other registrars fare less well.
Go Daddy and Register.com, which are both accredited .menu registrars, don’t seem to recognize the higher-tier names at all.
Go Daddy reports the name is unavailable.

And so does Register.com.

For every .menu name that carried a premium price at Name.com, Go Daddy was reporting it as unavailable.
With Go Daddy owning almost half of the new gTLD market, you can see why its failure to recognize a significant portion of a new gTLD’s available nice-looking names might impact day-one volumes.
The experience at 1&1, which has pumped millions into marketing new gTLD pre-registrations, was also weird.
At 1&1, I was offered noodleshop.menu at the sale price of $29.99 for the first year and $49.99 thereafter, which for some reason I was told was a $240 saving.

Both the sale price and the regular price appear to be below the wholesale cost. Either 1&1 is committed to take a $15 loss on each top-tier .menu name forever, or it’s pricing its names incorrectly.
A reader informed me this morning that when he tried to buy a .menu premium at 1&1 today he was presented with a message saying he would be contacted within 24 hours about the name.
He said his credit card was billed for the $29.99, but the name (Whois records seem to confirm) remains unregistered.
I’d test this out myself but frankly I don’t want to risk my money. When I tried to register the same name as the reader on 1&1 today I was told it was still available.
If I were a new gTLD registry I’d be very worried about this state of affairs. Without registrars, there’s no sales, but some registrars appear to be unprepared, at least in the case of .menu.