.club now biggest-selling new gTLD
.club has overtaken .guru to become the top-selling new gTLD on the market.
According to today’s zone file report, .club now has 59,120 domains, having grown by 2,504 yesterday. That’s compared to .guru, which grew by 181 names to 58,791.
It’s been 12 days since .CLUB Domains predicted it would be at the top of the league table “within days”.
It’s taken 20 days for the gTLD to beat .guru, something the registry at first reckoned would happen within its first week of full general availability.
I don’t think yesterday’s spike has anything to do with the 50 Cent endorsement deal.
As far as I can tell, Fiddy has only been linking to his .com shop on Twitter since his .club domain went live and the deal does not seem to have generated any media coverage outside of domain blogs.
Taking the number one spot is only a relative success, of course. What’s important is that .club is still managing to move 2,500 names in a day three weeks after launch, something no other new gTLD has managed to date.
Could be the effect of this USA Today story (http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/05/26/baverman-startups-entrepreneurs/9447417/), but it is more likely that a single investor registered most of them…
Could also be around 2,000 mostly generic domain names registered over the weekend through 1API via an NZ-based private registration service. Smells like the “registered by the registry itself” type.
That might happen at some point, but I’ve checked with the registry today and it hasn’t registered any premiums, other than the 46 original ones.
We already heard about people who registered a huge amount of .club.
Only one of them seems real (Magnum Domains, Romanian who registered many trademarks with .Co and people laugh at him around) but the guy cannot be taken seriously.
I agree these numbers seem to be the registry keeping the momentum going, if you check the zone files, many of the same private entity is showing on the registrations. Not sure who is behind it, but it is not regular day to day end users pushing it.
I believe that’s true of all new gTLDs right now — domainers are pushing the numbers up as they have in all TLD launches in the past.
I’m not sure it’s entirely healthy, but it’s par for the course.
I agree that in many of the new TLDs you see domainers pushing the numbers. However, what we’ve seen over the weekend for .club doesn’t really fit that picture. Around 1,000 domains per day all through a single registrar and all whois guarded from my point of view looks suspicious.
My 7th Theory on the Future of New gTLD
Today, I will reveal my 7th point, usually based on verifiable circumstances beyond the control of new gTLD operators.
The previous six, were related to ICANN payment and registration of new gTLDs to guard it’s brand, Local events, Mathematical Formulae, behavior of Registries regarding the dot com extension, trending on Social Media, more mathematical formulae, and so on. These could be located on thedomains, and Ricks blog.
Today, the 7th veil is the based on the .在线 String. There are a billion Chines! So how many registrations this TLD garners will reflect acceptance of the idea as a whole. To date it is not encouraging. In my opinion, anything less than the equivalent population of United States, is a flop; that’ll be 300 Million!
So take a guess where it is today.
If you guessed 100 million, or more, you’re waaaaaaaaaaaay off.
It’s at:
.在线 (online) 31,594
That is the total registrations. Given China’s population, that number should the per hour registrations. Unfortunately, it’s the grand total. And just 38 registered yesterday, the entire day!
Therefore, I conclude that the Chinese are not buying the new G concept as well. It’s a big deal.
Domenclature,
You seem a prolific writer; so why not record your thoughts (such as the 7 Theories on the Future of New gTLD’s) on your own blog at Domenclature.com?
Steve
Totally agree, with Domenclature.
Chinese market is of some interest to me, having registered .cn domains.
As for .club, there must be huge number of potential name infringements: many of those clubs are INC…