poll Is there a future for new GTLDs?

[Leo Angelo]

I was surprised to learn today that a non-domainer friend migrated his website to the same name .blog because "for a blog, .blog makes more sense than .com." What about the renewal fee? "$29/yr. Not enough to be a deterrent."
He is an intelligent person who appreciates using the best and the fewest words. Using the self-explanatory TLD makes sense and is worth the extra money, in his opinion.
Maybe the new GLTDs are making inroads with public awareness and will keep gaining market share. What do you think, how do you feel about it?

 

[jmcc]

Leo - I think the horsepower for new TLDs will come from bundling TLDs with specific hosted applications.

The .BLOG is interesting. You have WPEngine charging $290 per year for Wordpress hosting. It is a nice business. Wordpress or others could easily compete there by bundling .BLOG with high performance Wordpress, e.g. enhanced with BitMitigate.com for CDN, DDoS mitigation and site optimization.

It is a good example of a tied TLD, Rob,
The .BLOG is an unusual one in that it has a natural market that ties in with the dominant software in that market.

The same can apply to most of the other new TLDs. Some registries understand this and are starting to put serious efforts behind platform innovation. In particular, I believe that Donuts will do this following the controlling investment by Abry Partners last year.

The main concentration of a lot of registries is now on renewal rates. This is how TLDs live and die.

Also, keep in mind that if .COM, .ORG and others lose their price caps in the coming years, the gap between TLD prices will go away regardless which will set the stage for accelerated adoption of new TLDs. All that said, I do think the window is closing for this.

The .ORG registry made a decision to stop discounting offers (or curtail them) last year. It is beginning to work out. It is getting rid of a lot of noise from the zone and it is stabilising renewal rates. The price cap issue is very tricky. With NGTs with high renewal fees, the renewal rate is quite stable. Low registration and renewal fee NGTs have lower renewal rates. Unlike a lot of the NGTs, the majority of registrations in the NGTs are new. The bulk of registrations in the legacy gTLDs are veteran registrations that have been renewed for a year or more.

There is plenty of room for innovation in this space. The industry should see TLDs acquiring operating companies and moving from primary dependence on registrars for distribution. It is the only real way forward but most registries lack the courage to embrace that reality.

Consolidation is inevitable. The problem is that there are some NGTs that do not seem to be viable in terms of gaining new registrations each month (hundreds rather than the necessary thousands a new TLD needs in its launch phase).

Some of the registries completely underestimated the marketing requirements for new TLDs. Unfortunately there were a lot of spoofers passing themselves off as experts when the NGTs were being dealt with at ICANN level and the ICANN predictions were pure Numerology/Astrology by people who were completely ignorant of the dynamics in the domain name market. The registries cannot bypass their registrars. The number of active registrars in NGTs varies and registars generally limit the shelf space for TLDs. If they are not making money from them, they won't carry them. A large registrar like Godaddy has scale but most of the smaller registrars tend to concentrate on the NGTs that are targeting their markets. If there is to be a big marketing push on the registry side, it will probably focus on the registrars with their own reseller/white lable operations. There are only about 2,500 ICANN accredited registrars but there's around a million or so hosters in the gTLDs. Many of these hosters are small operations that will never spend the money on becoming a fully accredited ICANN registrar. There was a discussion of this kind of outsourcing in the African market at one of the ICANN sessions a few months ago. The market is changing and the gTLDs are no longer the blue chip TLDs in many country level markets as the focus is switching away from .COM towards the local ccTLDs. Unfortunately ICANN's registry-registrar model is about twenty years out of date and needs to be overhauled.

Regards...jmcc

 

[MapleDots]

There is a procedure for gTLDs that fail (Emergency Backend Registry Operator/ EBERO) where another registry can take over the operation of a gTLD where the registry has issues.

Yup and other registries will line up to bail out a failing one.

The thing about failure is it usually means losing money.
When is the last time somebody did charity by buying out a failed business?

I think if and when one fails it will fail period.

 

[jmcc]

Does anyone see stats that support mass end user adoption other than mass speculator adoption?

Yes.

Also, Giving away .88 cent domains is a desperation move, and like then what happens with .loans filled with Spammers according to Spamhaus.

The problem NGT is .LOAN not .LOANS. In terms of usage, the ex-Famous Four .LOAN NGT is rather low as most of the sites are either adult or gambling affiliates. There are actually some genuine on-topic websites there dealing with loans. Over the next few months, if the new registry management does not resume the discounting model, the .LOAN NGT will lose approximately a million or so registrations. That is a good thing as most of these registrations are problem registrations and damage the credibility of the TLD. The Spamhaus stats apply to e-mail rather than usage. What has happened with these problem registrations is that they have almost completely moved from the legacy gTLDs to the new gTLDs (NGTs) that were running discount operations.

“Schilling informed me that GoDaddy will stop offering Uniregistry top level domain names. This isn’t the first time GoDaddy has dropped Uniregistry names, but it seems they now have put a permanent transition in place.

Basically Frank had to stop thinking like a domainer and start thinking like a registry operator. What he did, as unpleasant as it sounds, was the right thing. A new TLD cannot depend on domainers for all of its registrations. It needs Mom and Pop operations that will develop websites and get the TLD noticed and encourage others to use it.

Regards...jmcc

 

[jmcc]

Yup and other registries will line up to bail out a failing one.

The thing about failure is it usually means losing money.
When is the last time somebody did charity by buying out a failed business?

I think if and when one fails it will fail period.

This is the side of the business that most domainers never see. If a TLD fails, then it generally means that it cannot cover costs. But if it has a sufficient number of registrations and these are brand protection registrations, these registrations will keep on being renewed. So if a deal can be done on the debt, a failed TLD can actually work out well for the operator that buys it. The .MOBI is a good example of this. For domaining in the Western market, it is effectively a dead gTLD. Many of its registrations are historical. But they keep on being renewed. The new first year registrations tend to renew at about 53%.For a non-core gTLD, that's not bad. The market in the gTLD has shifted and it is no longer a US/CA/EU/AU/NZ market and much of its new registrations come from the Asian market. It is continuing to decline in registrations but it is doing so slowly.

If a TLD fails and it has enough good quality registrations, then it will be picked up by a portfolio operator. Where a TLD fails badly and has no decent registrations, then it will be stuck in EBERO. The .WED is a good example of this.

Regards...jmcc

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

Most nTLDs are served by Donuts...
I don't see any reasons why Donuts should fail...

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

The same regarding Afilias nTLDs...

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

.mobi failed because nowadays it has no sense with modern gadgets.

 

[jmcc]

.mobi failed because nowadays it has no sense with modern gadgets.

Yep. It was in trouble as soon as Apple launched its smartphone and stuck with .COM as the default. MOBI's market has shifted. It still has renewals from brand protection registrations but it anyone pitching English language domain names is going to find it far more difficult than selling the same name in .COM.

Regards...jmcc

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

My recent US buyer (solid engineering company) said that low-mid 6F pricetag for the same .com is an absurd.
And such explanations I hear very often from the incoming endusers...

 

[Bob Hawkes]

Fact is there have already has been a number of failures in the new gTLD market and fact is that a number are scheduled to shut down.

Sorry to be argumentative, but this isn't fact is it? Many brand domains operated by a company only for their own purposes decided to give up using their own TLD. These are documented in a thread Kate maintains. But these are not new TLDs in the sense of this thread - i.e. in extensions anyone could register and make their website on as an individual small company.

As far as I know only a single new gTLD has "failed" (.wed) and even it is at moment still limping along in EBERO status (I think). It had a bizarre business model with $150 for year 1 and $30,000 for year 2 (really! Who thought that was smart?). It launched with a single registrar handling it, and I think only ever had 2 or 3 registrars, and only ever had a few hundred registrations. And even it is not yet non-operational.

So let's not confuse things, @MapleDots - are you talking about brand domains a company owns, and decides year by year whether to keep doing it, or are you talking about a company branding on a Google, Radix, Donuts, XYZ etc. new domain extension?

While it is true that the extensions with the most solid backing and sound business plans are most secure, but so far, and we are now 5 years into it, despite the struggles the number of new extensions which are open to anyone to register that have failed is I think 0 (but the $30,000 per year 2+ .wed is on life support).

Bob

 

[Bob Hawkes]

@HotKey said a couple of really critical things above that I wanted to give my perspective on...
https://www.namepros.com/threads/is-there-a-future-for-new-gtlds.1133844/page-2#post-7210870

He suggests that the process will be gradual, and one day people will realize that new gTLDs are established without quite realizing it was happening. I see that too - much slower than many thought, and I still think it is some years away. I don't think that it is ever that people in general will know if there is a .dog or a .soy TLD (yes there are) but rather people will get used to the fact that all sorts of endings are possible and accept that.

I actually think Google will play a rather big role in this, in addition to the success (or not) of their specific TLDs. They are a universally recognized name, whereas most of the registry operators are not.

The second thing @HotKey says though is new extensions becoming established does not automatically mean that there are good new extension domain investment options and that investors need to be really careful. I agree entirely. In many ways the registries have advantages and it is challenging to find a profitable role for new domain investors. I am much more confident that in 10 years new extensions will seem natural than I am that a lot of money will have been made by new domain investors.

Bob

 

[jmcc]

As far as I know only a single new gTLD has "failed" (.wed) and even it is at moment still limping along in EBERO status (I think). It had a bizarre business model with $150 for year 1 and $30,000 for year 2 (really! Who thought that was smart?). It launched with a single registrar handling it, and I think only ever had 2 or 3 registrars, and only ever had a few hundred registrations. And even it is not yet non-operational.

It gest back to the whole idea of "experts" not understanding the business, Bob,
The whole NGT program originated because of the artificial demand caused by Domain Tasting/Kiting. Most of each day's drops in COM/NET/ORG were being hoovered up before ordinary domainers and users could get to them. Thus the whole idea that all the good domain names were taken started to propagate. There was also a dark side to this in that brand names such as Dell were being targeted by bad operators who would register tens of thousands of variations of the brand names in combination with whatever computer or offer was popular. So the ordinary would-be registrants couldn't get domain names and brand owners were getting very upset with ICANN and its failure to stop the abuse. So the new gTLDs (NGTs) were seen as the solution. So for $185K a pop, a company could, once it passed evaluation, get to run a gTLD. As with any new business, this did attract a lot of complete spoofers passing themselves off as experts and promising the gullible millions of registrations and untold riches. But ICANN was shamed into enforcing a kind of restocking fee for domain names deleted during the Add Grace Period. It had been free from registrars to register and delete domain names during this five day period. Domain Tasting almost collapsed overnight and the floodgates were opened. The artificial demand for many of the new gTLDs had disappeared. Legal action was also taken against some of the worst abusers of brand/trademarks and these registrars were shut down.

The weird thing about the .WED business model is that it makes sense in a non-domain name industry sense. There would, in this theory, be a finite number of combinations of names and they would be to advertise a one-off event. The domain names wouldn't be needed after the event. The problem is that the domain name business doesn't work that way. TLDs make most of their money from renewals. The new registrations matter but the renewals are solid, repeating income.

Some of the registries completely underestimated the costs of marketing and the demand for their gTLDs. They were frequently single gTLD operators. Some of them sold out to the portfolio operators like Donuts. These gTLDs were not successful in their original incarnation but the transition from single gTLD registry to being part of a portfolio operator generally went unnoticed by the end users. Since the deals are done without the NGT entering EBERO, they don't appear as failed gTLDs.

While it is true that the extensions with the most solid backing and sound business plans are most secure, but so far, and we are now 5 years into it, despite the struggles the number of new extensions which are open to anyone to register that have failed is I think 0 (but the $30,000 per year 2+ .wed is on life support).

The .WED has been frozen since January 2018 and it is even eternally pending on the CZDS. The .WEDDING is currently around 22K registrations. (The single/plural/variation thing is a whole new set of arguments. The backing and business plan matter but the fate of TLDs is decided by demand. If the registries don't promote their gTLDs and don't help registrars to promote them, then the gTLDs just don't get traction in the market. The blood trails on gTLDs that are in trouble are visible in the registrations, renewals and usage. By usage I mean real web usage analysis rather than the cargo-cult rubbish. It is possible to estimate which domain names will not renew based on a combination of these statistics and an algorithm. The correlation between poor web usage and development and low renewal rates is quite stark. One NGT had a renewal rate of 0.58% for 2017 registrations and the 2018 renewals are going to be as bad. (The multi-year registrations are also an indication of how a gTLD is perceived by its registrants. More multi-year registrations and renewals are good.) However, the removal of these low quality and heavily discounted registrations from the NGT is a good thing as it will, theoretically, allow the NGT to recover. It can take about five years for newly launched TLDs to stabilise. The completely screwed up launch pattern (another ICANN mess) means that some NGTs are only on their first renewal while others are on their fourth. Thus the XYZ and TOP have millions of registrations and .APP is approaching its first renewal and .DEV is still, technically, in its land rush period of operation.

Regards...jmcc

 

[tonyk2000]

Basically Frank had to stop thinking like a domainer and start thinking like a registry operator. What he did, as unpleasant as it sounds, was the right thing. A new TLD cannot depend on domainers for all of its registrations.

And, by increasing prices, Frank actually saved his NGTLDs. From what? From what is hapenning with .xyz or .top : cheap registrations, $0.01 promotions and the like = TONS of spam and other questionable activity = bad reputation = no future.

 

[johnnie018]

Yep. It was in trouble as soon as Apple launched its smartphone and stuck with .COM as the default. MOBI's market has shifted. It still has renewals from brand protection registrations but it anyone pitching English language domain names is going to find it far more difficult than selling the same name in .COM.

Regards...jmcc

New tld has all same problems! .mobi still has 400k registration @full price, better extension than any new tld.

 

[jmcc]

And, by increasing prices, Frank actually saved his NGTLDs. From what? From what is hapenning with .xyz or .top : cheap registrations, $0.01 promotions and the like = TONS of spam and other questionable activity = bad reputation = no future.

Higher registration and renewal fees mean that people are less likely to drop domain names and will keep renewing them. It almost kills new registration rates for a few months (and maybe a year or so) after a price rise but the higher cost also means that people might be more inclined to develop sites or use the domain names for e-mail or branding. The higher prices also discourage domaining. That flattens the demand in the first six months of launch (the land rush period) because domainers are not registering and selling domain names and promoting the NGT.

The XYZ zone stuffing was brilliant marketing despite the negative aspects. Discounting is always a tradeoff. The new registrations have to keep ahead of the deletions. The renewal rate for discounted registrations varies according to the discount and can be around 5% or lower. But XYZ targeted the most blue chip registrar first. Many of the registrants who got the free XYZ domain names automatically renewed them so that group of registrations renewed better than most of the registrations on the Chinese registrars (a completely different market and a highly speculative one). The heavy discounting also shifted much of the questionable registration activity away from the legacy gTLDs but XYZ isn't as bad as some of the other NGTs that have been using discounting. There is actual usage taking place on the gTLD because it provides a cheap entry to hosting for businesses and web developers outside the US/CA/EU/AU/NZ markets. They may eventually graduate to a .COM but this is is a market with many country level markets and a cheap .COM registration in one country might appear expensive elsewhere. A cheap .XYZ or whatever might be the most cost efficient way for people to get their business online.

Regards...jmcc

 

[johnnie018]

Sales so far this year @namebio

.mobi - 13 sales
.club - 8 sales
.xyz - 3 sales
.best - 1 sale

If people think new tld is better than .mobi on what numbers? Wishful thinking?

Must buy only best new tld (I suggest people look at brands.international if they want the best ones)

 

[tonyk2000]

A cheap .XYZ or whatever might be the most cost efficient way for people to get their business online.

Yes, or whatever... In many non-U.S. cases it converts to their country code tld. Which is something a lot of new gtld operators do not think about, as a matter of fact

 

[Brands.International]

I also voted for "there is a future for new gTLD names".
Although I think some members here are very impatient...instead of forever discussing whether new gTLDs are worth it or not, I would say just focus on building your own portfolio, so you have at least few great names with low renewals. Nothing more I can add to it, really

 

[offthehandle]

https://twitter.com/DomainKing/status/1120283219323162624

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

Nothing more I can add to it, really

I only can add:

Try to live without NameBio... and without various idols and kings.