Friday, February 28, 2020

New gTLDs for Catering and Culinary: 2019 in review

We, French, like Food...and actually, this report is one of the first that came to my mind in 2016 when I started to publish weekly (then monthly) domain name registration volumes from specific industries. There were three applicants for the .FOOD new gTLD and one only for the similar IDN Top-Level Domain (.食品) which makes that string exist in two versions: English and Japanese. The funny thing about this example is that the Japanese version (belonging to AMAZON) has more domain names created - 58 in total - than the ASCII version which had one only in December 2019. It stuck to one since it was delegated in November 2016.
I compiled a list of 23 Top-Level Domains and noticed a few things for catering and culinary new gTLDs in 2019:
  • There is another IDN for the .RESTAURANT Top-Level Domain. It is its Chinese version, the .餐厅 new gTLD. If the ASCII version had a total of 8,000 domain names in December, the Chinese version had 70 (but it is increasing).
  • There were seven .BRANDs new gTLDs and three were withdrawn before 2019. One .BRAND is active, it is .FAGE which has created 61 personalized domain names in total but none were created in 2019 (it stuck to 61 from January to December).
  • The three withdrawn applications were .PAMPEREDCHEF and surprisingly, the two other were from McDonalds: .MCD and .MCDONALDS. I wonder how long it will take McDonalds to submit an application again :-)
  • Two ASCII TLDs exist in two languages: French and English: the .COFFEE (19,521 registrations) and .CAFE (15,959) new gTLDs.
  • The two surprises of the year are .BAR and .REST: both had more than 20,000 domain name creations in December. The two of them gained an important number of creations in the end of 2019: +12,000 for .BAR in November and +16,000 for .REST in December. Interesting, isn't it? Note that I am not sure about .REST and still wonder if it means "restaurant". It is possible that I remove it from this report in the future.
  • I personally like the .EAT new gTLD which is operated by Google but for some reason, nothing happens with it and it sticks to two domain name creations. I can't wait to see what's Google plan for this one.
  • The other TLDs listed here do progress slowly, very slowly in volume.
Read the full report here.

Coming: "New gTLDs for Sex and Alcohol: 2019 in Review"

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