Success of the New TLDs Skip to main.

November 1, 2014 marked the first anniversary of the opening of the new TLD era with the launch of .guru, .singles and more.  And now with hundreds of successive new TLDs released since then, now much of the industry focus is shifting to how these new TLDs are doing (performance).

Sseveral metrics are being used to analyze the performance of these new TLDs most of which look at registration numbers, renewal rates, and even aftermarket sale values.  Another key metric is to look at actual usage (deployments) for a specific TLD. Andy Brier, founder of Namestat.org, tracks exactly that. In fact, he started up his company Namestat to help track these new TLDs as they proceed from application to registry contract, root zone delegation through to Sunrise and eventually to General Availability.  His company also continues to track on-going performance, market share and registration trends of the new TLDS after they are open to the public.

Namestat has recently started tracking usage of the new domain name extensions for active and highly trafficked websites.  According to Andy, "using publicly available datasets such as Alexa’s list of Top 1 Million Sites industry-wide trends can be extracted which give some insight into usage of the new gTLDs. One simple but meaningful analysis counts the number of incidences of new gTLD domains occurring in the Top 1 million list each day."

Top-ten Performing new gTLDs by Number of Domains in the Alexa Top 1 Million websites (as of December 5, 2014)

1) .XYZ        249

2) .CLUB      232

3) .TODAY     75

4) .LINK        67

5) .GURU      61

6) .ROCKS    33

7) .TIPS       32

8) .WEBSITE  32

9) .NINJA      27

10) .SEXY     25