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Google shifts 400,000 .site domains

Kevin Murphy, August 22, 2017, 10:30:23 (UTC), Domain Registries

Google has given away what is believed to be roughly 400,000 subdomains in Radix’s .site gTLD as part of a small business web site service.
Since its launch a couple of months ago, the Google My Business web site builder offering has been offering small businesses a free one-page site with a free third-level domain under business.site.
Google My Business also offers users the ability to upgrade to a paid-for second-level domain via its Google Domains in-house registrar.
Google the search engine indexes 403,000 business.site pages currently. Because each subdomain is limited to a single page, it is possible that the number of subdomains is not too far behind that number, Radix believes.
This means that business.site is likely almost as large as the .site gTLD itself, which currently has about 450,000 names in its zone file.
Given the rapid growth rate, it seems likely the subdomain will overtake the TLD in a matter of weeks.
According to Radix, business.site was purchased off of its registry reserved premium list. The sale price has not been disclosed.
It’s good publicity for the TLD, and merely the latest endorsement by Google of the new gTLD concept.
As well as being the registry for many new gTLDs, Google parent Alphabet uses a .xyz domain and its registrar uses a .google domain.

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Comments (11)

  1. Richard Funden says:

    How much was the premium fee?

  2. THCNames.com says:

    I wonder how many of those sites will stay active? Not that many I imagine.
    Google has the marketing muscle to get people to use subdomains. I wonder if this sort of thing is possible for a smaller hosting company?

    • Kevin Murphy says:

      Given that there’s probably no expiration date on these subdomains, and no fees, they could last a lot longer than you might think.

      • THCNames.com says:

        True Kevin.
        I guess I was thinking of this like Blogger. These are business websites where there will be no blogging. Lots of those blogspots domains are still around even if they are not updated 🙂

  3. Bill Doshier says:

    Free .buzz domain to any registrant of a third-level domain under business.site. Contact: bill@the.buzz

  4. Jasper says:

    Think might help the smaller businesses for a long time period.

  5. Mark says:

    That will put a lot of eyes on .site for sure!

  6. Jasper says:

    Hmmm

Leave a Reply to Jasper