Elon Musk chaos credited with surge in .social regs
Elon Musk’s chaotic takeover of Twitter has been credited with leading to a surge in .social domain registrations last month, according to registry Identity Digital.
.social leaped into the top 10 of the company’s most-registered TLDs at number five internationally and number two in North America, second only to legacy .info, the company reported this week.
ID said that month-over-month .social regs increased 435% in the first two weeks of November.
It’s a pretty small TLD, so the boost only equated to an increase of about 5,000 domains in November, according to zone files, which put the current count at about 35,000.
Musk closed his acquisition in late October, and he started Trussing it into the ground the following week, laying off thousands of employees and cack-handedly attempting to monetize the “blue check mark”.
ID reckons this is behind the increase in .social sales, with CEO Akram Atallah saying in a press release: “Volatility in social platforms that people rely on leads users to take action to own their digital identity and content, which often starts with finding a domain name.”
He pointed to Twitter alternative Mastadon, which is a decentralized, open-source platform and uses a .social domain, as a driver for the growth. Some of the new .social regs point to Mastadon installs, ID said.
ID also sold premium names arts.social, lol.social and justice.social during the month, but no .social domains appear on its top 20 sales in its most-recent monthly report.
Rightside new gTLD renewals can top 80%
Rightside says it is seeing encouraging renewal figures from its oldest batch of new gTLDs.
The company this week revealed that renewals after two years of ownership on average stand at 81%.
In a blog post, Rightside broke out some numbers for .dance, .democrat, .ninja, .immobilien, .social, .reviews and .futbol.
Those seven are the only ones in its portfolio to have gone through two full renewal cycles.
The renewal rate after year one was a modest 69% — in other words it lost almost a third of its installed base after 12 months — but this increased to 81% after the second year.
The actual number of domains involved in quite tiny — 81% equates to just 21,000 names across all seven TLDs.
Breaking out a couple of TLDs, Rightside wrote:
Our first gTLD to market, .DANCE, saw a 70% renewal rate in year one expand to 83% in year two for that same subset of domains. Our best performing gTLD of the seven is .IMMOBILIEN, which renewed at 83% in its first year, and grew to a stupendous 87% in its second—which certainly makes sense given the permanent nature of real estate.
But Rightside reckons the numbers reflect well on the new gTLD industry. It said:
domain investors with portfolios including new gTLDs recognize the long-term value of these domain names, and rather than let them drop after the first year, are holding onto them to find the right buyer continue to earn parking revenue. Second—and likely the more significant driver—is that end users are actually picking up these domain names and putting them to use.
Rightside slashes new gTLD prices to $0.99
Rightside registrar eNom is to offer domains in several Rightside gTLDs for $0.99 over the coming days.
Today, .rocks domains can be obtained for the special price. They’re usually $12.99 a year.
The price does not apply to renewals. Customers have to use the promo code “pocketchange”.
Rightside stablemates .forsale, .reviews, .ninja and .social will get the $0.99 treatment for one day each over the coming week.
As we’ve learned over the last several months, super-cheap domains boost TLDs’ numbers as some of the internet’s less than ethical characters bulk-register thousands of throwaway domains at once.
So far, gTLDs such as .xyz, .country and .kim have been affected by these spikes, which I currently believe are related to typosquatting campaigns in legacy gTLDs.
I would not be at all surprised if Rightside becomes the latest registry to see its volume swell for similar reasons.
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