Introducing Stringtel, my new free new gTLD tool
I’ve launched Stringtel, a free, industry-first string discovery and risk mitigation tool for new gTLD applicants.
Stringtel is designed to help applicants reduce the risk of their chosen gTLD strings being banned or incurring extra costs during the application process, as well as helping them discover potentially valuable undelegated strings.
The TL;DR
Stringtel gives you data that will help you pick a good string to apply for, and tells you some of the risks that string might present during the application process.
The goal is to help applicants avoid wasting tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on crappy applications.
Risk mitigation
Stringtel implements the string-related rules in the latest version of ICANN’s New gTLD Applicant Guidebook, along with other risk factors, leveraging a database of almost a million possibly problematic strings, to offer applicants a quick look into issues that could kill or complicate their applications.
Enter a string and Stringtel will tell you if it would be blocked outright under AGB rules, or could trigger additional analysis, objections, fees, or contention with other applicants.
Stringtel does dozens of risk checks, along with countless associated string similarity checks, to give you a shortlist of the most likely reasons your application might fail.
Opportunity identification
New gTLDs might have a better chance of succeeding when they reflect how domains are already being used.
Stringtel analyzes over 180 million domains across .com, .net and .org, counting how often specific strings appear immediately to the left of the dot.
If a string is already widely used as a domain ending, that’s a signal of existing demand. For example, if tens of thousands of domains already end in “bakery”, that suggests a .bakery gTLD could have a ready-made market.
Essentially, Stringtel shows you where registrants are already behaving as if the dot were somewhere else — and where a new gTLD could turn that behavior into shorter domains.
It also helps filter out strings that look appealing but have little real-world usage, reducing the risk of applying for a gTLD nobody actually wants.
And because everyone keeps asking…
No, Stringtel does not record your searches. The data would be useless. I have no visibility whatsoever into what you’re searching for. Neither does anybody else.
Thanks to the sponsors
Many thanks go to Stringtel’s two launch sponsors: Hello Registry and John Matson Consulting.
Hello Registry, a venture of leading ccTLD registries CIRA (.ca) and SIDN (.nl) hosted a webinar on March 31 explaining how to apply for and operate a new gTLD.
Matson has launched TLD.fit, a financial modelling tool that helps new gTLD applicants build their business cases before they pull the trigger on an application.
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