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Oops! TLD Registry over-reports first-day figures

Kevin Murphy, April 28, 2014, 20:44:54 (UTC), Domain Registries

TLD Registry’s first hours of Chinese IDN gTLD registrations were not as big as previously reported.
We reported earlier today that .在线 (“.online”) and .中文网 (“.chinesewebsite”) had made it to 54,011 names and 38,838 names respectively, just one hour after the 1300 UTC general availability.
However, a few hours later the company told us it had accidentally included thousands of registry-reserved names in those totals.
The actual numbers are 33,012 for .在线 and 17,537 for .中文网, as of 1900 UTC.
These are still extremely impressive numbers, and .在线 is still the biggest launch to date, surpassing the 31,645 with which .berlin ended its first day of GA a month ago.
That gTLD is likely to end the day in third or fourth place in the new gTLD league table, depending on how .photography (with 33,489 names this morning) performed today.
.guru’s crown remains.
Both sets of new numbers include sunrise, landrush and up to 10,000 names registered to the Chinese government under a special pre-release deal the registry negotiated, but they do not include reserved names.


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Comments (20)

  1. Kevin, thanks for the correction. I’m glad our joint-registry and Afilias team was able to debug the early numbers and correct them quickly. TLD Registry is delighted with the GAs of Dot Chinese Online & Dot Chinese Website, and we’re incredibly excited to bring a much easier web experience to a fifth of humanity.

  2. Ms Domainer says:

    *
    Almost 19,000 registry reserved?
    Wow!
    *

    • Ms Domainer, it looks bigger than it actually is. We have around 10K Chinese character domains registry-reserved. This is not out of order with other New gTLDs. The “other” 10K are the Pinyin equivalents. Effectively, the same name, written in ASCII. We typically have bundled the Pinyin with the Chinese character domains, for our last month of premium domain sales. Disclaimer: I’m with the registry.

  3. Steve says:

    If you’re going to compare these to the success of other TLD’s like .berlin, it’s probably more accurate to net off the 10,000 domains that the registry reserved for the Chinese government, as these aren’t reflective of commercial achievement.

    • Steve, I can see that POV, but Chinese govt are a registrant, and the domains will be developed into sites. I’m not sure how one big registrant’s tranche of domains should differ from any other registrant’s. But there is plenty of room for debate and different POVs, just as there are plenty of potential registrants and users of fully-Chinese domains on this earth! Disclaimer: I’m with the registry.

      • Rubens Kuhl says:

        Everything that only takes DUM into account is fundamentally flawed. Perhaps a Balanced Scorecard with DUM, Revenue, Relevance of SLDs for end-user traffic and recognition could better represent how the registry is performing its role.

        • That is a great idea, and probably not crazy difficult to code for. It would become a subjective rather than objective measure, but taken on the balance against DUMs only, it would help our industry a lot. Disclaimer: I’m with the registry.

          • Phil Buckingham says:

            Simon, Rubens – Agreed, a great idea & not too difficult to code for us financial geeks. Using BS effectively will separate TLD wheat from the TLD chaff.
            Congrats on the launch. IDN’s are the way to go.

    • Kevin Murphy says:

      The registry tells me that these names were “sold” to the Chinese government, so I think they count as proper user registrations, albeit not GA sales.

  4. Domain EE says:

    Does it really matter? Who cares if there were 33K or 54K chairs on the deck of the Titanic? The main point is that each of these dumb-ass gtlds will all soon be going down. Of course the initial numbers were “accidentally” inflated. I’ll bet .mobi claimed to have a stellar first day too.
    IN a year or two, it will all matter naught.

  5. Mike says:

    Initial day numbers are actually very important, usually within a few days the volume really drops, and the registrations become a trickle, but china is an entirely different beast, we will see what happens.

  6. Kassey says:

    Are .在线 and .中文网 subject to control by government in China, just like ccTLD?

    • Kevin Murphy says:

      The company is technically based in Ireland, believe it or not, though I don’t believe any of its key executives are Irish. I expect Irish law holds dominion.

    • Rubens Kuhl says:

      Any TLD wanting to do business in China has to comply with Chinese government control, no matter which jurisdiction they are based.
      And they can’t even talk about what controls they are subject to, like a forbidden name list they can’t publish its contents but have to abide.

      • Kevin Murphy says:

        Does Nic.br have any Chinese customers, Rubens? Are you subject to Chinese government control?
        I know DI has Chinese readers, and I’ve yet to receive my call from my new masters 😉

        • Rubens Kuhl says:

          NIC.br customers are required to have Brazilian Tax IDs and Brazilian addresses, so we don’t expect any Chinese customers… we also do not support non-Latin IDN for either domains or contact information…

      • Kassey says:

        I’m surprised. If the registry is located in Ireland and contents are published on servers located outside China, I don’t see how the Chinese government can control the contents. Of course, they can block access to servers located outside China, but I just don’t see how they can influence the registry and registrars located outside China. Can you shed more light on it?

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