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domains Status Quo Bias Favors .com Top Level Domain, But For How Long?

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The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
Bob I believe the Ntldstats site does not reflect drops on a timely basis as does Namestat.org
Thank you. I agree there is a lag in reporting as the two use a different (I think) standard re what they consider the current registered number (i.e. do you include grace period, etc.). Of course in long term these do not matter, as both get it right. For short term, you are right that the nTLDstats is higher than it should be when there has been a rapid drop.

The only reason I used nTLDstats was that it allows me to easily look at how much fluctuations there are in past year, two years or five years. Unless I am missing how to do it (possible) NameStats (a superb service!) only allow a 3 month comparison? Even if you subtracted the entire number you note new gTLD registrations are up from where they are a year ago.

Anyway my main point was simply to say that to extrapolate we need to take a view over much more than one month. Extrapolations even in a year long view is not really valid I would argue. For example if you took the CENTR most recent report released a few weeks ago and extrapolated using even year over year data .info would be to 0 registrations in about 3 years. I don't think any of us believe that it will go to 0 (even if we don't see much of a future for the extension as investments). Based on a one year extrapolation from the CENTR data the Swedish country code is on road to extinction in not many years but I am sure that is not true and that there are reasons for the big YOY drop.

Bob
 
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These are the sites that controls every of our lives, and they are all using .Com
I would just point out that our US friends sometime overlook how different this is for those in other countries. For example from Canada this is my personal reality....
  • The banks I do business with all use a .ca as their primary access for me for their online banking.
  • I order online from Walmart and as a senior they deliver to my apartment. For me I do all ordering on a .ca.
  • My credit card portals are all on .ca.
  • I order from time to time on Amazon but for us we use the .ca entry.
  • My life insurance is with a national group on a .coop
  • I use an .org almost everyday (Wikipedia)
  • The charities I most frequently give to are on a .org (3 cases) and a .ca (1). None on .com
  • I use a car share. It is on a .coop TLD.
  • The public library I use online daily is on a .ca.
  • The company that handles my retirement investments is on a .ca as primary access.
  • All of my interactions with municipal, regional, provincial and federal governments are on .ca sites.
  • Our apartment insurance (a different company than the life insurance, a local one) is on a .coop.
  • I use NameStat a lot. It is on an .org
  • I take online courses from time to time through Coursera and EdX. Both operate on an .org.
So if NameBio, my registrars, and NPs would get on a .ca or .org, my life could pretty well be .com free :-P I do have a subscription to a Canadian national newspaper and it uses a .com as does my TV/internet provider. Of course companies like Walmart, Amazon etc have a .com, but in other countries they usually have the services for that country through a country code access.

I realize that the world is very heavily .com dominated overall (about 46% actual use, depending on your source). I also realize that while I deal with a few alternative extensions (the three on the .coop) none are new extensions. But I think our US friends sometimes think all the world operates in the TLD environment they do, and it is not so in many areas of the world. People here do not guess an extension is .com. If they were ti guess anything it would probably be an .ca.

So to the topic of the original article, a law firm here could logically use a .com, a .ca, an.org or a .law (or other new gTLD). I actually searched through and it seems more use .com than anything else. However, in the nearest large city (Vancouver) I could find at least 17 firms using the .law extension (not counting several news, directory or service sites), so I think the law community, at least locally, are considering multiple possibilities. I realize that in a number of these, quite probably most, they have retained their .com or .ca as well. I think a lot of developers are doing that now. They took a .dev so that they have it, have redirection, and are going to see if it is worth having.

Now I personally don't see any profit in investing in new domain extensions to sell to the law community. But if I ran a law practice I see certain virtues in having one, as article explains.

Bob
 
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I ran a law practice I see certain virtues in having one, as article explains.

As long as it isnt a $xxx high premium renewal price and the adoption rate and registrars cash position is strong enough to maintain the extension forever. Just imagine 5 years from now if a law firm finds themselves orphaned with a failed extension or price increases due to lack of adoption.

.coop, that extension, I won’t bother to joke about putting a chicken emoji left of the dot.

The article is educational as intended, not for domainers. So educating the law profession public of extensions available is the weak link in the marketing chain, the article targets that very well as intended. Mass market adoption and public/peer recognition is the key or huge pricing per domain as a registrar to survive. $79 renewal is a 10 minute phone call for a garden variety civil lawyer and chump change. Having too many law related extensions though confuses people. Btw, How many are there anyway? .law, .lawyer, .legal? Those exist? I think ICANN isn’t smart to allow both .Loan and plural .Loans to exist, just seems dumb as a governing body supposedly serving the public interest to allow duplicates and confusing consumers not to pick one or the other.
But its all about $$$.
 
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.coop, that extension, I won’t bother to joke about putting a chicken emoji left of the dot.
While you can joke, as a restricted alternative extension the .coop seems to be doing rather well at least in Canada. It has the advantage that only registered entities in the Cooperative movement can get one so that it is essentially free of malware. Spamhaus rate it as better than .com by a factor of 34 in percentage abuse (and give it their best rating score of 0). A multi decades old car share in this region with many thousands of members has transformed to it, a cooperative bank in this area with 2 million members in my province is beginning to use it. Would you rather use an extension that is run by a nonprofit organization or one under the control of a foreign government (as .com is, in the final say) or a private registry (as most of the new extensions are)? It has been operating for 16 years, for those unfamiliar with the .coop TLD, and the umbrella organization is controlled and supported by a variety of cooperatives in different regions.
Bob.
 
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As long as it isnt a $xxx high premium renewal price
The article is intended for law professionals. In virtually every case a domain name would not be a premium if they were getting their own name. Here are the extensions and the wholesale prices for renewal. One can lock in these prices with renewals for up to 10 years if desired. Retail are of course a few dollars higher if you shop around for the best prices.
  • attorney $25
  • law approx, $75 (my source does not have wholesale for this TLD)
  • lawyer $25
  • legal approx. $35
  • partners $10
Having too many law related extensions though confuses people. Btw, How many are there anyway? .law, .lawyer, .legal?
I put the ones I know about above, possibly there are others. I agree that ICANN must have been asleep at the wheel when they approved both the .loan and .loans and other confusingly similar. Here, though, there might be a solid case for having multiple possibilities. I think one of the arguments for an alternative extension for a business is if they can get an exact match name. Like lets say my law firm is called Hawkes Partners. Being able to have Hawkes.partners is at least elegant. But many law firms use the law as part off their company name like Smith-Brown Law in which case having that extension so that they can register SmithBrown.law or Smith-Brown.law is an advantage.

As I said earlier in the thread, I would not consider any of these as domainer investment opportunities. I think we agree on that.

Bob
 
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The whole purpose of the GTLD's were that there were not enough good .com's available to register, or they were to expensive on the secondary markets. What happend registry reserves, premium renewals, warehousing, and in most cases the annual renewal on some gtld's is the entire cost of an aged .com in the aftermarket which only carries forward with an $8 renewal, and not a 4 figure renewal renewal on an annual basis. It is an utter nightmare, as you have so many operators running so many different ways, all with a different set of rules. There is no protections in the framework for consumers when it comes to GTLD's, an unruly operator could easily extract a keyword extension from an owner by raising the price to a million dollars a year, since there is no cap, or no framework in the contract to directly contact the registrant, simply the registrar.

As an actual example of that you would think such a well known, established and experienced place like DomainAgents.com would know or can find out what premium renewal fee is for any specific name however they do not know, in fact it appears they do not have the foggiest idea on it.

So I was recently using DA to negotiate buying a new tld and have now thrown in the towel. At first the DA cust serv rep seemed to not even understand the question I was asking but after some back and forth he said incorrectly any premium renewal fee is determined by my name registrar such as Godaddy and not by the registry so that cannot be determined until after I buy the domain and not before!

When I said that was not correct, DA said all we can do is email the question to the seller (whoever that may be) and then we need to rely on seller replying and also giving an accurate answer to the basic question.

My latest messaging to DA and seller is why in the world would anyone buy a name for say $4,000 when yearly renewals may also be as high as $4,000. That means after say 10-years I paid 40k total but may have been able to buy the .com up-front for 40k with normal renewal fees.

Please do not misunderstand, I am not saying DomainAgents.com is not a good place to deal with and have always found them good in every way EXCEPT on the issue of possible premium renewal fees. I am also sure this scenario is happening at other places too not only DA. This subject may end-up being big negative to the new gltd market as time goes by, in fact it already is.
 
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As an actual example of that you would think such a well known, established and experienced place like DomainAgents.com would know or can find out what premium renewal fee is for any specific name however they do not know, in fact it appears they do not have the foggiest idea on it.

So I was recently using DA to negotiate buying a new tld and have now thrown in the towel. At first the DA cust serv rep seemed to not even understand the question I was asking but after some back and forth he said incorrectly any premium renewal fee is determined by my name registrar such as Godaddy and not by the registry so that cannot be determined until after I buy the domain and not before!

When I said that was not correct, DA said all we can do is email the question to the seller (whoever that may be) and then we need to rely on seller replying and also giving an accurate answer to the basic question. Radix is really front heavy on premiums also. Donuts can be hit, and miss depending when their extension was released.

My latest messaging to DA and seller is why in the world would anyone buy a name for say $4,000 when yearly renewals may also be as high as $4,000. That means after say 10-years I paid 40k total but may have been able to buy the .com up-front for 40k with normal renewal fees.

Please do not misunderstand, I am not saying DomainAgents.com is not a good place to deal with and have always found them good in every way EXCEPT on the issue of possible premium renewal fees. I am also sure this scenario is happening at other places too not only DA. This subject may end-up being big negative to the new gltd market as time goes by, in fact it already is.
Happens at sedo also, you have to be very careful, what was the .extension you were looking to buy, some extensions are blanketed very heavily by renewals, others not so much.

Sometime in late 2016 they really put the screws to the premiums, some of which they are trying to scale back now, as they are finding they are getting no traction to people wanting this everlasting renewal over their heads when .com only charges $8-10.
 
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You could simulate a transfer of the domain name at some registrar, then you'll see if it's standard renewal fee or not. Of course there is no guarantee they won't jack up the price in the future but that is another matter.
 
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I searched google for "Vacation Rentals" just now. Top are paid VRBO and Homeaway then this is the first organic listing. Somebody might verify it on their end but Vacation.Rentals didn't even rank at all and I went down 8 pages. Sad really, so much for cost recovery. And I live where there are lots of vacation rentals. AARP ranks likes 2nd page.

Show attachment 113323

I just hate when people make up crap to support their agenda.

Vacation Rentals has never been page 8 - never. Even our biggest drop only took us down to page 3 - number 28.

Today - this very moment - we are number 14 both on Google and Bing and here is the screen shot to prove it from SEO Powersuite..

https://www.screencast.com/t/272BpSaQq

And here is another capture from SEMRush

https://www.screencast.com/t/C1chbydvjNb

There is so much angst in this industry about the gTLDs and it is perplexing to me as to why. I hold nothing against .coms and even said as much in the interview. If it's available and you can afford it - great! Buy it! If not, there are other options available.

The point of the toll free was this. 1-800-Domains is not available. Okay, here is an alternative 1-888-Domains or 1-877-Domains. All things being equal, I would personally take the 800 over the nTFNs :D Consumers are no longer jammed into a corner of dot com. And yes, there are literally 100s of sites that are ranking #1 organically with their gTLDs, so that argument holds no water.

Yes, our initial launch of the site was rough. Yes, we had some coding issues. Yes, we have never ever marketed the website - ever, but we are happy. In fact, ecstatic is more like the word.

We are making a difference, we are turning corners and we will be just fine. We are going to do our absolute best to put homeowners back in charge of their homes and listings and give both parties a great experience. And we have already locked in the domain for 10 years along with hosting for 5 years. IOW - our costs are very known and nothing is hidden. Donuts has been wonderful to work with.

Championing VRBO, AirBNB, Booking.com is only helping consumers to be gouged without a second thought. You simply cannot fathom the amount of money that is taken from homeowners and travelers alike. But - keep pushing them. It is really immaterial to me. Our homeowners are getting bookings - the site is growing - and we will continue to celebrate the opportunity we have received.

Have a great day everyone
 
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I just hate when people make up crap to support their agenda.

So you accuse me of lying? I would take screen shots if I could even find it and thought it was worthwhile, and now with your dumb response just leave you to your misery of wasting money. I have no agenda, I dont care if people believe in the tooth fairy or Santa Claus either. You can’t argue with beliefs, and New Gtld are religion for some people.

You conveniently left out the part about page rank has to do with location.

I am not searching from within the US. It does not even show up at all in the huge tourism vacation paradise where I live. And thats all I will say.
 
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I am not searching from within the US.

And you conveniently left this little tidbit out of your original post.

It does not even show up at all in the huge tourism vacation paradise where I live. And thats all I will say.

Let me guess - Baseball and round door knobs are not a big search term in your locale either. We are content to simply work on the North American side of the planet. Should we ever conquer NA - we will then explore expansion, but for right now it is simply enough for us to keep the focus on our own backyard.

Regardless whether I believe in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy, it does not negate the fact that the money is spent - it is gone - there is no do over and I have never once - ever - regretted my decision. Never.

Same can be said for Blake Janover with Home.Loans I know for a 100% fact he is over the top in joy with his purchase as we have talked plenty in the past. If anything, I am slightly jealous of his success as he is doing significantly better with his site and portfolio. At NamesCon he stated through his websites home.loans - hud.loans - etc. he has underwritten a half billion worth of contracts. Because of his massive success with his sites, he was offered and accepted a position as a contributing editor on Forbes magazine for the real estate sector. IOW, his gTLD purchase has been worth every cent as well.

At the end of my 10 year run I can assure you I will still hold the same happiness that I possess today. I wish the same for you.
 
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Vacation.Rentals is a nice name and I realize ranking a website for a competitive search term is not easy. However, from West Palm Beach the site does not appear on page one of either Google or Bing. Roughly 90% of search traffic is on page one and most of that above the fold. So a site which is not on page one does not get much organic traffic at least for the term in question. Of course there are long tail searches and link traffic and direct type-in traffic from repeat visitors. The site does appear a bit down the page on page two.

Here is the problem I see. - if I visit an established travel search site such as Expedia in a few travel destinations I am familiar with, there are dozens of results to choose from. But when I search Vacation.Rentals the few results which appear are not even close to the desired destinations.

West Palm Beach
Expedia 199 results
Vacation.Rentals 1 result in Jupiter more than 15 miles away

Miami Beach
Expedia 1204 results
Vacation.Rentals 3 results none which are even in the same county as Miami Beach

Raleigh, North Carolina (middle of the state)
Expedia 366 properties
Vacation.Rentals -3 results two in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina and another in a NC beach town hours away

So for the above three searches (and I have checked others and found similar results) the site is not useful for finding a vacation rental. After an experience like that a visitor will not return and will choose alternative sites - the competition. Regardless of organic search or even paid traffic, If the occasional visitor does not find the site useful they will not make bookings and will not recommend it to friends and family so the site will not earn commissions and thus the acquisition price of the domain comes into question. Why would someone pay so much money for an alternative extension domain (MANY multiples of the prices experienced individuals in this sector have seen from alternative extensions) yet create a site which is basically useless for the clients it is intended to attract?
 
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The posts are interesting (and of course Google search results are very different depending on your location and other factors), but seem fairly distant from the article starting the thread, which was re merits for law firm using legacy or new extension.

Bob
 
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The posts are interesting (and of course Google search results are very different depending on your location and other factors), but seem fairly distant from the article starting the thread, which was re merits for law firm using legacy or new extension.

Bob
My apologies Bob - I did not intend to hijack your thread.
 
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My apologies Bob - I did not intend to hijack your thread.
No I was not singling you and it is not my thread:xf.wink:. I think your clarifications were helpful particularly for those not at NamesCon. I was just reminding us all what the original article was about. I should have made more clear I was not meaning any particular post. And of course almost every thread at NPs goes all over the place! :xf.confused: Best wishes for your business.

I would like to see more discussion around TLD choices for professionals, though, and law that @Tewksbury article deals with is a good entry point.

Bob
 
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I think .com will stay #1 for very long time until a point at which there are really few "meaningful" .com variations available (total saturation), but it is hard to tell when this point in time will happen because there are endless possible names and combos that a brand can register, take 5L & 6L alone it will take very long time before they will get saturated.
 
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There is so much angst in this industry about the gTLDs and it is perplexing to me as to why. I hold nothing against .coms and even said as much in the interview. If it's available and you can afford it - great! Buy it! If not, there are other options available.
Thanks for providing more info about this story @Vacation.Rentals which I’ve followed with great interest. (Thanks also for your following interesting update about the success of Home.Loans.)

So I was able to quickly find a link to part of the back story to your clever acquisition. Most especially that HomeAway had bought the dot Com more than a decade ago.

“The CEO of the company in 2007, Brian Sharples, indicated that it was mostly to keep it out of its competitor’s hands and a big part of that was the domain name.”

Vacation.rentals domain name sells for record $500,300

Domain Name Wire

https://domainnamewire.com/2018/04/11/vacation-rentals-domain-name-sells-for-record-500300/
 
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You could simulate a transfer of the domain name at some registrar, then you'll see if it's standard renewal fee or not.
I agree that is the best way to check for already renewed names - pretend you want to transfer it and put it in your cart. Also one can enter it in MrDomain that gives the renewal rate even for premiums already registered (but recheck to be sure another way or with registry). For names not already registered, an easy way to check the wholesale purchase and renewal costs is Domain Cost Club.I wish that ICANN would enforce a single database where all premium renewals had to be registered (perhaps with their wholesale cost to registrar plus some sort of suggested retail value). Would make life simpler.
Bob
 
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Thanks for providing more info about this story @Vacation.Rentals which I’ve followed with great interest. (Thanks also for your following interesting update about the success of Home.Loans.)

So I was able to quickly find a link to part of the back story to your clever acquisition. Most especially that HomeAway had bought the dot Com more than a decade ago.

“The CEO of the company in 2007, Brian Sharples, indicated that it was mostly to keep it out of its competitor’s hands and a big part of that was the domain name.”

Vacation.rentals domain name sells for record $500,300

Domain Name Wire

https://domainnamewire.com/2018/04/11/vacation-rentals-domain-name-sells-for-record-500300/

You are welcome.

Vacation Rentals .com still continues to do huge business - especially since they are part of the Expedia family now and it is a great site.

At NamesCon I said the following and it will remain to be the fact probably for the rest of my time doing this. If you think of this as a pyramid divided into 3 - AirBNB VRBO and FlipKey are at the top of the pyramid (tier 1) At the bottom (large part of the base) is Tier 3 - Flipping, Tripz, Homeescape, and yes, www.vacation.rentals is there as well.

In the middle - Tier 2 - there is nothing. There is a chasm between the ankle biters (us) and the eagles (them)

Within the next 2 weeks we will make a move to become Tier 2 and will remain there probably for the next 3-7 years while we hit our growth rate. Trust me - the releases we have tested and refined are industry disrupting and we could not be happier.

Buying the URL was and will continue to be the easiest part of the process. Wish everything since then would have been this easy.
 
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Walking through downtown West Palm Beach I noticed a van parked with the website decal on the back....

CityPlaceVacationRentals.com

For the exact match keyword phrase they rank solidly above the fold on page one of Google and Bing. Their listings are only relevant to the West Palm Beach area but they seem to offer about twelve locations and about thirty properties in total. Site navigation is so-so.
 
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Google.com
Facebook.com
Amazon.com
baidu.com
Twitter.com
CNN.COM
NYTimes.com
Instagram.com
YouTube.com
Alibaba.com
Linkedin.com
VK.COM
Bet365.com
Pornhub.com
iTune.com
ESPEN.COM
Foxnews.com
Godaddy.com
Reddit.com
Pinterest.com
Flickr.com
Microsoft.com
AOL.COM

Etc,etc,etc, etc.

These are the sites that controls every of our lives, and they are all using .Com. Until these sites stops using .com and starts using .whatever. Until then, .com will always have great bias in it's favor. Because, every startups would want to be like them.

Deliveroo

Is a uk founded fast food delivery tech venture start up based on a uk Cctld

Eg. Co.uk
 
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Deliveroo

Is a uk founded fast food delivery tech venture start up based on a uk Cctld

Eg. Co.uk
Before you know it, they will acquire the .com version for 5-6 figures and quickly switch :xf.cool:

A UK based IT company who has been using .co.uk just purchased their .com version from me two weeks ago and quickly switched

That's what we're talking about, every startups wants to emulate the big giants
 
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Walking through downtown West Palm Beach I noticed a van parked with the website decal on the back....

CityPlaceVacationRentals.com

For the exact match keyword phrase they rank solidly above the fold on page one of Google and Bing. Their listings are only relevant to the West Palm Beach area but they seem to offer about twelve locations and about thirty properties in total. Site navigation is so-so.


Again, as I said - there are 100s of Tier 3 sites out there and I did include our site amongst them. No debate from me.

You are looking for Polaroid results and I am telling you we are going to settle for the old fashioned way - we are going to earn it. Methodically, strategically, purposefully.

 
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Let me guess - Baseball and round door knobs are not a big search term in your locale either.

Yep, we all have square wheels too, dirt floors, no air conditioning no running water, no electricity. But we do have clean air, no traffic.

no-ac-here.jpg



Championing VRBO, AirBNB, Booking.com is only helping consumers to be gouged without a second thought.

Gouged? It's simply a matter of trust, best of luck when you might pinch off a crumb of the market share in an over saturated marketplace. Your SEO trust flow needs some work.

vr-stats.jpg


Just to double check- Went 9 pages on : site:.rentals in Google and you still don't show up.
Yet a site like, 34145.rentals is on 3rd page. camping.rentals and clevervacation.rentals
are on 2nd page.

I also see your strongest backlinks are not from any Vacation or Travel websites or testimonials from trusted customers blogs and have nothing to do with vacations- ...but with domaining blogs, I guess that's why you posted here. lol.

vacation-rentals1.jpg


Even one from the Registry.
https: // donuts. domains/great-domains/premium-domains/

vr-donuts.jpg
 
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It's like some random person on the internet says something and it's newsworthy. I just saw Morgan's post, thought it was something new but from back in January, let's look at the graphic again:

Here’s a pretty nifty chart that shows the domain extensions used by startups that went through Y Combinator in 2018 picked.

Just really think about this.

.ai is being used more than all of the other new gtlds combined.
.co is being used more than all of the other new gtlds combined.
.io is being used more than all of the other new gtlds combined.

We're up to what now, 400, 500, too many. It will always be #1 overall. You can't show me 1 that would even have a chance.

ycombinator-domain-extensions.png
 
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