What’s new with the new gTLDs?

I’ve recently been reviewing a number of new gTLDs to better understand the trends and which ones will potentially be of greater value than others. In my opinion, this regular practice is crucial for any investor that is wanting to gauge when is the best time to stomp down their cash and invest in an extension.

Overall, the new gTLDs have not had a spectacularly good year. The number of registrations peaked in April at just over 29.5 million but since then there has been a sharp decline to just over 23 million. To better understand what’s going on I dug into some good and bad examples of new gTLDs.

.CLUB has been the poster child of the new gTLDs and in many respects, rightly so. Backed by a solid team their focused marketing has meant they’ve built what appears to be a good solid base of registrants that are using the extension.

Although it was a little rocky at the beginning of the year, .CLUB has surged ahead and bucks the overall recent downward trend with a steady sustainable growth. The one concern I have is that according to nTLDStats 60% of the registrations are parked. Despite this, as many of you are aware I’m a big believer in .CLUB……in fact, my wife and I are now blogging together on lifeexplorers.club.

The next group of extensions I looked at were .xyz, .top and .vip. The combined decline of these three extensions are really what is driving the downward trend in overall new gTLD registrations.

What is puzzling is .xyz’s recent big drop of close to 3.8m registrations. If we were to go back twelve months you would expect to see a large rise in registrations but we don’t. The closed inverse mirror of the decline is around 18 months ago where there was a comparable sharp uplift in registrations. I was not aware that 18 month registrations were possible…..or maybe it’s .xyz cleaning out a lot of dead wood during the northern hemisphere summer vacation.

.vip has had a recent decline but it was off the back of a sharp increase at the beginning of April…..it will be interesting to see if there is a commensurate decline around April 2018.

.top has been in a steady decline for much of the year and one wonders when it’s going to stop. It doesn’t look like it’s bottoming out any time soon. Considering that over 75% of the registrations are from China then it could be the registrations are a reflection of the tightening monetary policy by the Chinese government.

What are my conclusions? There are a few extensions that are building a sustainable business model while it’s clear others are struggling. The extensions that built their registrations on marketing hype are clearly suffering as the reality of a lack of business model bites.

I’m starting to invest in a few extensions for mainly personal reasons but I still believe the market is still very immature and will take another four years or so to settle down. In the meantime, I’m still going to be watching the numbers!

* All stats sourced from ntldstats.com