The top 35 most-popular new gTLD sites
New gTLDs have been on the market for months now, and the slow process of building out sites is underway.
As regular readers and DI PRO subscribers know, one way DI tracks the popularity of domain names, and therefore their corresponding TLDs, is using Alexa rankings.
These scores are not perfect, but they’re a reasonable way to highlight which new gTLD domain names are getting traffic from internet users.
There are currently 635 new gTLD domains in Alexa’s top one million most-trafficked sites, up from just 10 when I checked almost six months ago, February 19.
Only 35 of those have a ranking better than 100,000.
I visited each in turn today to determine to what use the registrants have put their names.
In this top 35, I found two instances of apparent malware distribution and one instance of possible cybersquatting. Four returned errors. One (www.link) is a blocked name collision name.
Notably, controversial BitTorrent index The Pirate Bay, which has been TLD-hopping for many months and recently got kicked out of .guru, seems to have found a home in .uno.
Only one of the domains redirects to a domain in a different TLD.
One (gen.xyz) is a new gTLD registry’s official homepage.
The remainder represent a broad cross section of regular internet usage: blogs, tools, photos, sport, porn, get-rich-quick schemes, forums, file-hosting, and so on and so forth.
Varying degrees of professionalism can be found on these sites. Some are very pretty, others very ugly.
There’s even one site on the list that appears to be a legitimate corporate home page. On reflection, no it isn’t. It’s a Get-Rich-Quick site.
These are my results, make of them what you will.
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It’s possible that the “error” sites are actually malware sites filtering out your access either due to IP-country relation or user-agent. It’s quite common to see malware sites targeted at one country to block access from other sites, trying to preserve resources and to evade security companies. Alexa has some country-specific sites, so it would be interesting to see whether the sites (error or not) correlate to one country…
It appears to me that life was allot simpler when we had only .com, .net, .org. Also feel that this onslaught of domain name extensions has hurt the value of the TOP .com names.
Kind of curious when enough is enough…
We’ve had a site built on .guru since just after the domain left availability.
It’s primarily for customers of one of our divisions so isn’t likely to attract a lot of traffic.
We went with the .guru name as it’s mainly an educational tool to help them manage their various types of waste and we felt we could build some marketing around the .guru name. Not glamourous, but a handy little website in its niche.
Very interesting to see the sites classified by type.
It’s actually surprising how lousy the domains are as names. Hardly a decent name in that list except for Gen.xyz, which is operated by the registry itself! Adrenaline.zone is alright but doesn’t resolve. Oh, and WomensLife.today is passable.
Without a doubt, there are better nTLD domains out there; but apparently the webmasters with SEO chops and marketing resources don’t have the best taste in naming.
archive.today strikes me as a perfect name for what it does.
You’re right. I didn’t see that one.
don’t forget the domain 🙂
italy.travel
regards,
The quality of the names/sites may be a factor of the registrars keeping the premium names for themselves for later sale. The whole GTLD market is slightly less than transparent!