It’s been six years since the first of the new gTLDs was introduced in early 2014. The first to launch was .shabaka (“network” in Arabic) in February quickly followed by 4 of Donuts’ new gTLDs while .club wasn’t far behind launching in May 2014. Since then .club has gone from strength to strength and today is the eighth largest with 1.369 million registrations, having peaked at just over 1.65 million in January, July and August 2019.
To celebrate its sixth birthday, the team behind .club has put together a series of memories and highlights. In the first year rapper 50 Cent got his own .club domain and they won a couple of T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Awards as well as a Domainer’s Choice Award and achieving over $1 million in premium sales.
In 2015 revenue passed the $1 million mark, they won a couple of Domain Conference awards as well as reaching the 700,000 registrations mark. In 2016 .club domain names were approved for sale in China, they won another Domain Conference award and cumulative premium sales hit $4 million.
It took to 2018 for the one million registrations mark to be reached and they launched their broker and interest free financing plans. Then in the fifth year they launched Names.club, a marketplace for brandable generic top-level domains and yet more awards!
By 2019 and there were over 340,000 live .club websites and premium names revenue surpassed the $8 million mark.
Today there are registrations in over 170 countries with 221,976 unique registrants while 179,181 registrants hold one .club domain name. And they claim to be the number one new generic top-level domain when it comes to usage, 2.5 times that of the next best. And as the team have previously revealed, every one of their domain names is paid for – they don’t give away any freebies.
This article was updated on 13 May to reflect that .shabaka (.شبكة) was the first new gTLD to launch followed by 4 Donuts new gTLDs including .guru with .club close behind. Originally the article said .guru was the first to launch.