New gTLDs for Photography: 2019 in Review

Photography is very much present on Internet: the web is a great way to introduce visual elements to a public. For this reason probably there are so many new domain name extensions dedicated to photography. I listed 25 of them and here is what I noticed in 2019:

• There are seven .BRANDs and most popular photography Trademarks are represented: .CANON - .NIKON .PANASONIC and the .SONY new gTLD. Surprisingly, one Trademark withdrew its application (a long ago): the .OLYMPUS new gTLD.
• By the way, CANON is launching this in April 2020 and it is the most active photography .BRAND new gTLD in terms of usage: it added 10 new domain names to its total of registrations since January. Canon uses 48 personalized domain names.
• Did you notice: isn't .CAM is very close to .COM? I 'd consider such extension in terms of Brand Protection.
• Three TLDs have more than 50,000 domain name creations (and increasing) and .ART is number one from that list with a total of 72,703 domain names registered. It had 44,920 in January.
• Three domain name extensions are very similar: .PHOTOGRAPHY - .PHOTO and .PHOTOS : these similar new gTLDs can become a nightmare in terms of strategy if you forget to buy...the three of them for the same second level domain you planned to use. Let me explain: if you buy whatever.photo and forget to register whatever.photography and whatever.photos, chances are high that a third party will do it in the future. This is a risk in terms of Brand Protection.
• All nine TLDs above 10,000 domain name registrations (but one) had more domains created in December than in January: that is a positive sign, adoption is coming. The .DIGITAL and .VIDEO are some of them.
• Nine extensions from that list did not maintain their registration level from January to December and .WEBCAM, which started the year with a total of 54,270 domain names created, only had 5,773 in December...
• I see some sort of competition between .FILM which ended the year with 4,511 registrations and .MOVIE (3,268 registrations). We would use the word "film" in French, but not in Spanish. English speaking person would use "movie" I guess. French tend to use complete stupid names with hyphens sometimes so I guess that the movie industry should be approached in France.
• There is a .MOV (for movie I guess) operated by Google but it sticks to 2 domain name creations. I would be Google, I'd use for the Movie section of YouTube. Hey wait! There is a .YOUTUBE and a .TUBE too.
• My opinion on why .PICS does not meet with adoption is that the meaning of the string is already too old: worldwide bandwidth now allows to have fast access to media content, aren't "pics" kind of old now?
• I like .FILM, come on dotFilm, open a virtual branch in France, there is space for you ;-)

Read the full report here.

Coming: "New gTLDs for Catering (and Culinary): 2019 in Review"