Monday, December 11, 2017

City new gTLDs: blue or red?

Which have been the number of domain name registered for city names as a new domain name extension in 2017?

From January 2017 to December 2017, we took a monthly snapshot of each city domain name registration volume. There are 42 of them to which we added 2 domain name extension related to cities:  the .CITY and the .TOWN new gTLD. Tours is a famous city in France so we added it too.


Blue or Red?
As usual, blue is for the city names which gained domain name registrations from a month to the other and red is for those who lost some.

In general, we can see that there's not so much red in the table but for a few TLDs. This is not the case for other groups of TLDs. As you will notice below the problem with city TLDs is that...they stagnate.

Some cities are successful: the .TOKYO Top-Level Domain gained 25,000 registrations in one year and 16,000 for .LONDON while the .NYC gained almost...no registration on a 12 months period of time.

There is an interesting project out there which explains the success of the .CITY new gTLD: one registrant own 22,000 of them: let's hope that this project is a success! The .TOWN knew a constant progression curve until beginning of december 2017. These two generic TLDs do progress.

If .TOKYO is a success, the .VEGAS is another one, it gained 6,000 registrations in one year and never went backward from a month to the other. Other city TLDs which have sticked to the blue:
  • The .BOSTON new gTLD which launched in September 2017;
  • The .YOKOHAMA Japanese TLD;
  • The .TOURS (not a city TLD but I don't mind, it is a city too in France);
  • The .BRUSSELS extension;
  • The .OKINAWA extension from Japan;
  • The .KYOTO extension from Japan.
Some city TLDs are still in "we have no idea what to do with our TLD" mode and have registered very few domains: .DUBAI - .MADRID - .ABUDHABI and .STOCKHOLM (when a TLD registers a very limited number of domain names, it can mean that it is doing tests and there nothing more coming).

January was better than December
Some cities had more domain names registered in the beginning of the year, in January 2017 than in December 2017. It is the case for .NYC - .BERLIN - .KOELN - .HAMBURG - .PARIS - .MOSCOW and its IDN, the .МОСКВА new gTLD - .WIEN - .ISTANBUL - .MIAMI - .IST -.QUEBEC - .BARCELONA - .COLOGNE - .DURBAN and the .RIO new gTLD. Some of these registration volumes stagnate, let's hope 2018 will be better year.

Check the full report here.

.BRAND new gTLD Reports are updated once a month: CLICK HERE !