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information .Loan drops under 50k registrations

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At the start of 2019 .LOAN was the #3 nTLD extension with nearly 2.2 million registrations. The promo registration fees which have been holding up registration volumes in many nTLDs were eliminated. Renewals dropped sharply and over the last nine months .LOAN has lost over two million registrations - more than 95% of what it had at the start of the year. .iCU seems to have taken its place but I believe in time, .TOP, .XYZ and .ICU will see a similar decline. .CLUB actually has a nice ring to it and makes sense for many niche websites. It may eventually take the #1 ntld spot. Why am I so cautious about ntlds? .NET and .TV - sounds like a good reg but much harder to sell than one would think.
 
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The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
.net, .org, .biz & .info are on a slow but steady decline as well, from what we can observe.
 
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I'm thinking the .Loan registry might need to get a loan! lol


That said .. let's not assume that 50k registrations at regular prices is automatically a bad thing!

It's just ludicrous to think there would ever be anything close to 2 million potential end users for a .loan domain.

I think if you were to go back 7 years to before the launch of the ngTLD program and ask if .loan had 50k registration in 2019 (including likely quite a few premiums), that most of us would say that isn't bad.

All that said, I think the biggest problem with .loan is that it's not .loans .. seems that when people are looking for a loan, they like to see multiple options, so in this case the plural would likely be the first and preferred natural language choice.


Dont forget that profit margins aren't the same for each gTLD .. and that's fine. While each gTLD should most definitely strive to be profitable .. there are many different possible paths to get there.
 
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Not quite sure why you started a new thread rather than adding updated numbers to the thread on this topic that you started a few months ago @garptrader? That thread has good information from @jmcc in particular so seems unproductive to move to a new thread.

As I and others pointed out in other similar threads that the OP started, the former FFM TLDs, are now under (partially) different management since just over a year ago. They stopped deep discounting (at least at levels of before), bulk registrations and associations with some registrars, as well as other steps to improve the quality of use of the extension. I believe they have as names expired made a larger number premium now (I am not sure that is right, but think it is). As a result, we expected when this began just over a year ago that numbers would drop precipitously. It will be interesting to see if they can turn the fortunes of the TLD around. A big task for sure.

As @Ategy.com correctly points out, it never made sense that .loan would have that many registrations (especially when there is a .loans option as well).

A good indicator of how many real users there are is to look at the parking percentage, the numbers with SSL certificates, the rating in some system like Majestic, Cisco or Alexa, the renewal rate, etc. These numbers were always very poor with .loan.

Essentially it is easy to predict which TLDs will see major drops. Those that
  • have super low discounted first year registrations, and
  • much higher renewal rates, and
  • the very deep discounting of first year rates ends
It is true that .loan is doing worse than all of the other FFM extensions registration drop and renewal wise.

Bob
 
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There's a curious effect with high renewal rates. It is similar to the idea in Economics of the sunk cost fallacy but it is slightly different. Some of the NGTs with higher renewal fees actually have stronger renewal rates because people are likely to value these domain names higher than heavily discounted or free domain names.

The other aspect is that "parking" is very difficult to measure and a lot of the stuff that appears on the web, such as the NTLDstats stuff, is woefully inaccurate.It was showing that .LOAN was 70% parked until recently. The reality was that the active usage rate in the gTLD was less than 1% based on the latest survey.

There is also a major problem with renewal rates based on the registry reports. The blended renewal figures from the registries tend to be more accurate than the monthly registry reports.

The geography of the gTLD also influences renewal rates and usage. If the gTLD's registrations are primarily in a country with a volatile market then that gTLD will show the same volatility. If a gTLD's registrations are primarily in a mature market, then that it will follow that market's dynamics. Some of the large NGTs are not single gTLDs but rather hybrid gTLDs made up of a stable market with good renewals and a smaller market based on heavy discounting. There is a high turnover with the discounted registrations.

There are some worrying trends with some of the current round of new gTLDs and a few of them have failed. Many of the Specification 13 brand registries have already terminated their gTLDs. (https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/gtld-registry-agreement-termination-2015-10-09-en ) Some of the open gTLDs are definitely not doing well in terms of registrations and usage. A few of them have been taken over but only one, .WED, is frozen in EBERO. Financially, it is difficult to see some of the low registration volume NGTs surviving.

And there are even people in the ICANN community talking about a new round of new gTLDs. If anyone ever wondered where the people from the Sub-Prime debacle ended up, there's a good possibility that they became new gTLD consultants.:)

Regards...jmcc
 
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37,579 this morning.

Regards...jmcc
 
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