information .WIN loses ~83% of registrations from peak

Abdullah Abdullah said:

@Bob Hawkes What is going on ? . I had to tag you since you use this extension.

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Bob Hawkes said:

This is actually good news!

Just over a year ago control of the former FFM domain extensions was wrested away by a subset of the investment group.The previous controllers were forced out (Kevin Murphy has provided the details on his blog in a series of posts last summer).

The new managers committed to abandoning deep discounting and improving the reputation of the TLDs owned by the registry, including .win. They took a number of steps to achieve this including cutting their arrangement with Alpnames and announcing termination of all of their deep discount agreements with registrars. One night last summer registrations went from costing $0.48+$0.18 at Namecheap to about $10 (and same for renewals and other registrars).

It was clear that without deep discounting registrations would fall a lot in all of their extensions. If you look at the current top 10 new gTLDs in terms of registrations, almost all (I think 8/10 currently) can be purchased for less than $1 in first year. The big registration numbers follow the deep discounting.

We expect registrations in .win to drop to a figure that the nature of the extension supports. Clearly the TLD works best for online gaming, casinos, sports, games, and domain name phrases. It never made sense that there were close to a million registrations in terms of real world demand, and most were simply being held a year as a low cost speculation.

For a 6 month period (ends in September) the new managers did a bit ago reduce renew/registration prices to about $3.50 retail at several registrars and that will probably prop up the numbers somewhat. However, I still expect lots to drop as we are not yet at the one year anniversary of the end of deep discounting at Namecheap where most were registered. Namecheap also used to have superb 5 year rates, so that may help even out the numbers as well. I wish I had registered more using that incredible promotion , but glad I did 5 year register a few .science in the hours before the promotion ended.

Re the abuse data posted by kam, it is important to realize that is old and based on sparse data. It is important to realize that the article was written well before the reorganization at former FFM; the date of the article is Feb 2018. However, the data it cites goes back further, into early 2017. But even beyond that. the data for .win seems to go back to a post in 2015. In that post it found 20 spam, 48 scam or questionable (this included things like appearance of a multi-level marketing scheme or too good to be true), 1 malware and a number they deemed suspicious but unproven.

I am not discounting that we should be concerned about TLD reputation, but it should be based on a significant dataset of up to date information. Fortunately for spam and some forms of malware it is easy to do this using Spamhaus that is updated daily and is based on data from billions of email accounts. As of today they show .win at a Spamhaus score of 0.91, in line with legacy extensions such as .com/.net/.info (larger registration bases get a higher score for same percentage bad, so really .com is a bit better). PhishLabs do a good job on phishing attempts in their reports.

Yes, I use a .win. I won't go into all of the reasons but I am keen on domain name phrases, and thought my own website should model what I promote. I plan to stay on it, in fact recently added a year at the current attractive renewal rate so have it now registered until 2028, The sale a few months ago of a .win domain for $22,500 to an end user showed that I am not alone in seeing a role for the TLD. But it will never again see many hundreds of thousands of registrations.

BTW please don't interpret anything in this post as promoting .win as a domain name investment. I have just 3, none of which were acquired in last 10 months. The registry has a lot of the good names as premium, and the niches the TLD fits are limited. While T sold for $22,500, the majority of the few other sales have been around $200 or less (and T is arguably the best domain in the TLD)..

Bob

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Bob Hawkes said:

Namecheap also used to have superb 5 year rates, so that may help even out the numbers as well. I wish I had registered more using that incredible promotion , but glad I did 5 year register a few .science in the hours before the promotion ended.

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