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First new gTLD Sunrise ends with “very few” registrations
The first new gTLD Sunrise period was not a success, according to dotShabaka Registry.
The 60-day Sunrise for شبكة. (.web in Arabic) ended yesterday with “very few” registrations, the company told us today, due largely to poor promotion of the Trademark Clearinhouse in Arabic-speaking regions.
The gTLD is restricted to Arabic strings, and therefore Sunrise was restricted to Arabic trademarks.
dotShabaka said in a statement:
We always knew – with the convoluted process for registration and lack of information out to the MENA [Middle-East/ North Africa] region on the Trademark Clearinghouse – that this was going to be a quiet time for us. We have seen very few applications through the Sunrise period.
We know that the managers of the TMCH and ICANN are working hard to promote the TMCH. However, as a pioneer we have unfortunately not enjoyed the fruits of this labour. At the same time it should be noted that we have been buoyed by the level of interest from trademark holders and businesses in the region and expect this interest to translate into registrations once we move into Landrush and are free of the TMCH sunrise eligibility requirements.
The company did not provide exact numbers, but my guess is that we might be looking at single figures here.
According to today’s شبكة. zone file, there are no active third-party domains in the شبكة. namespace. Zero. None. The only live sites are “nic.” and its Arabic equivalent, which both belong to the registry.
That may quickly change, of course, as registrations don’t always immediately translate into zone file entries.
Sounds like there’s a market for the .excuses TLD. 🙂
.DUH
Like any of the other gtld sponsors think they will do much better?
Face it, the gtld concept is stupid and the Empirer is wearing no clothes. The right of the dot idea would have worked 18 years ago, but it is way too late now.
Similar headlines with different extensions will surely follow.
Restricted to Arabic strings… My estimate is 30 registrations total in sunrise. Idn TLDs going first was such a bad plan by ICANN.
The best strings should have gone first, which is exactly opposite of what happened.
IDN
Non-contention
Brands
Contention Strings
This sunrise and landrush will not reflect the performance of other TLDs. The biggest mistake was restricting the whole TLD to only Arabic.
The idea of restricting IDN TLD’s to one script is a security measure, and a good one. Not quite so important with Arabic but certainly with Cyrillic and Greek.
Actually Jay, I predict the most popular TLD’s will be those ones that have the most dictionary terms in the blocklists – because those are showing traffic already (mistakenly marked as “error” traffic by the powers that be).
For example, the block list for the Cyrillic translation of .com reads like a “top 500 Russian search terms” list. That gTLD, once it finally launches, is going to explode.
The Japanese translation of .com has a very small blocklist indicating that it won’t be anywhere near as popular as Cyrillic .com (at least not without a major marketing exercise.
شبكة. (.web in Arabic) has quite a few top terms in the blocklist, so most people trying out the new gTLD by randomly typing in whatever comes into their head first will think it’s broken because the obvious names won’t work.
See: http://www.circleid.com/posts/20131104_yet_another_embarrassing_idn_gaff_from_icann/
The same goes from non-IDN’s too. The good ones have long blocklists full of top search terms. The ones that suck and will need MAJOR MARKETING EXPENDITURE to produce revenue have tiny wee blocklists.
The blocklists are the key indicator to newGTLD success.
ICANN is doing promotion for the TMCH? Where?
The dot com is a universal language every person in the world understands this.
20 years ago, no one in the world knew what dot com was. What will every person in the world know 20 years from now?