Friday, January 3, 2020

French new gTLDs: 2019 in Review

The end of December is always the right moment to have a look on what happened during the year: this is the review for French new gTLD applications, from January to December 2019:
  • The .BEST Registry, acquired by French entrepreneur Cyril Fremont, went from 4,745 domain name creations to more than 86,600: the registry kept increasing in volume. This is mostly due to brands.best, its program, preparing the launching of its coming Social Network The.Best (in 2020). By the way, I strongly suggest Trademarks to keep an eye on this TLD: this social network is an innovation focusing on the registration of domain names ending in ".best". In November, .BEST became the first French Registry in volume of domain names registered.
  • 3 French new gTLDs have more than 10,000 domain names registered:
    • .BEST
    • .OVH
    • .PARIS
  • I call them "Cultural TLDs" because they truly represent part of a French Culture: these are either Community or Geographic based applications with a strong identification. All of them kept increasing in volume since January 2019. Note that .ALSACE is a special case since this French region changed name recently in 2016. Their number of domain name registrations grow slowly but I am not surprised by the interest in these domains, these Top-Level Domains allow a culture to keep existing...and expand thank, to Internet:
    • .BZH for (the French Brittany)
    • .ALSACE
    • .CORSICA (the French island of Corsica
  • 4 French new gTLDs have between 1,000 and 10,000 domain names created. 3 are the cultural TLDs mentioned above and one is a .BRAND ! The MMA Trademark uses more than 1,600 domain names ending in ".mma" (instead of ".com").
  • Almost all other Top-Level Domains are below the 1,000 but that is not surprising since France is one of the countries to have created the most important number of .BRAND new gTLDs and dotBrands don't create too many domain names for their own use. Note that the volumes of domains created by these .BRANDs are noticeable and ended the year with:
    • 285 domain names created for the .BNPPARIBAS new gTLD (domain names ending in ".bnpparibas"). BNP PARIBAS is a Bank;
    • 173 domain names for the .LECLERC new gTLD (a superstore);
    • 148 domains for the .WEBER new gTLD : not the BBQ Trademark but a subsidiary of Saint Gobain offering solutions for new builds.
  • 15 more .BRAND Top-Level Domains end the year with less than 100 domain names created: between 2 and up to 73.
  • The .SCOR and .ALSTOM dotBrand new gTLDs created no domain names and stuck to one single registration from January to December 2019.
Read the full report here.

Coming: "Real Estate new gTLDs: 2019 in Review"

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