Recent Posts
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Are these the 10 most-popular new gTLD domains?
I’m a firm believer that the success of new gTLDs will be measured not just in registration volumes but also in usage, and usage is a lot trickier to measure than domains under management.
One way of measuring usage that’s very familiar to many domainers is Alexa, the Amazon-owned web metrics service that uses toolbars and other data sources to rank web sites by popularity.
This kind of popularity data has been incorporated into TLD Health Check for some time, as one of many means to compare TLDs.
Alexa data isn’t perfect, but it is data, so I thought it might be interesting to see which of the 147 new gTLDs currently in the root are showing up in its daily list of the top one million domains.
There are 10 names, half of which are .guru domains, on yesterday’s list. There are not many functioning web sites yet, but for whatever reason these domains all, according to Alexa, have traffic.
These are the domains, with their popularity rank in parentheses:
www.link (356,406)
The highest-ranking new gTLD domain on our list is actually banned by ICANN due to the purported risk of name collisions.
It’s reserved by Uniregistry and will not resolve or be made available for registration for the foreseeable future.
I think what we’re looking at here is a case of somebody (or more likely lots of people) using www.link in web pages when they really should be using example.com.
beatport.singles (538,603)
Possible cybersquatting? Beatport (I’m old and unhip enough that I had to Google it) is an online electronic music store and the domain is registered via Go Daddy’s Domains By Proxy service.
The domain presumably refers to music “singles” rather than marital status, but it doesn’t seem to resolve from where I’m sitting. Quite why it’s getting traffic is beyond me. A typo in a URL somewhere? IP lawyers?
gtu.guru (589,205)
The first resolving name on our list leads to a work-in-progress Blogger blog. It’s registered to a chap in Gujarat, India, leading me to infer that GTU is Gujarat Technological University. Another squat?
seo.guru (671,647)
The first domainer on the list, I believe. The guy who registered seo.guru paid roughly $2,500 for it during Donuts’ first Early Access Program. It’s currently parked at Go Daddy.
I’d hazard a guess that it’s on the list because it’s a dream URL for an SEO professional (or charlatan, take your pick) and SEOs checking its availability are much more likely to have the Alexa toolbar installed.
deals.guru (790,778)
This one resolves to an under construction page.
I’d speculate that the pre-release $8,100 sale of deals.xyz caused a lot of domainers to check out whether the same second-level was available in other new gTLDs, spiking its traffic and causing an Alexa appearance.
nic.club (796,727)
The only registry-owned domain on our list — nic.club is the official registry web site of .CLUB Domains, which has its .club gTLD in sunrise until the end of March.
Is its appearance on the list indicative of strong pre-launch marketing or something else?
beekeeping.guru (857,778)
I’m not making this stuff up. This domain belongs to a British pest control company but resolves to a default Apache page. I can’t begin to guess why it’s getting traffic.
cp.wien (864,800)
An unregistered name in a sunrise gTLD. Possible name collision?
shop.camera (873,146)
Hot dang, we have a web site!
The domain shop.camera was only registered 10 days ago, but it already leads to what appears to be a fully-functioning Amazon affiliate site, complete with “Shop.Camera” branding.
freebitcoin.guru (994,404)
An email-gathering affiliate marketing site that I personally wouldn’t touch with yours. Still, it looks quite slick compared to the others on the list and it appears that the owner has made some effort to promote it.
I do think it might be a bit early to already check Alexa numbers for the new gTLD’s. Any website needs a bit of time to develop an audience…
I do wonder how many domain names registered under new gTLD’s actually have an active (and unique?) websites on them. Since the audience itself should still be developing, at least knowing how many are actually trying to get an audience would be interesting to know.
Just like http://www.link, the name cp.wien can not be registered. Not because it’s on that same ICANN list, but because it could collide with a future country code. As far as I can tell, all two-letter second level names are blocked because of this, unless you can convince ICANN that it shouldn’t be a problem.
The very best .guru domains are still not live, thanks to ICANN’s not-properly-thought-through “collision” (cough, hack) blocklist disaster.
Expect anal.plumbing to top the charts soon.
“I can’t begin to guess why it’s getting traffic.”
While it’s data, it’s never been data most people have taken seriously since it’s some of the most easily manipulated data out there. That site you mentioned where you can’t begin to guess why it’s getting traffic, is probably just that site owner having the Alexa toolbar, nothing more. Plenty of videos out there on how to manipulate that data.
i also see
NewYork.Cab has been registered wow
this domain , definitely is on top 5 for new gtld 🙂
ya I agree with you, I thought for sure newyork.cab has been reserved but i guess I was wrong
shop.camera is on sale in sedo for 250k with 2 offers already lol
http://sedo.com/search/details.php4?domain=shop.camera&trackingRequestId=61329745&language=us&origin=search&fromExactMatch=1
There seems to be a lot of good GURU domains already in top 1million sites
http://siterankdata.com/show/extension/guru
but only 4 .camera domains
http://siterankdata.com/show/extension/camera