Donuts new gTLDs have been continuing to have renewal rates of around the 70 percent mark after six days from when renewals started commencing.And Donuts have also been continuing to post updates on their blog. As of day five, the cumulative renewal rate on the 43,365 domains that have come up for renewal is 70.0 percent.Looking forward Donuts believe renewal rates for their gTLDs will stabilise at the 70 percent rate, and then gradually move towards an 80 percent renewal rate as the proportion of names with active, website-content increases over time. Donuts has been measuring website-content in their gTLDs since 2014 and the percentage of names with dynamic, multi-page content has increased every month, in every gTLD, since they began measuring.On specific gTLDs though there are variation. In the day six blog post Donuts compare .bike and .ventures. Of the 14,538 .bike names registered in the first year, 5,958 have passed through auto-renew and 75.4 percent of those were renewed. This compares to the 7,594 .ventures domains registered in the first year with 2,805 passing through auto-renew so far, and 67.6 percent of those renewed.But there is a significant price difference between the two – $65 for .bike and $99 for .ventures at Asia Registry and around $25 for .bike and $42 for .ventures at EuroDNS – but Donuts don’t think the price difference between the TLDs is the driving factor in renewal rate variation (75.4% for the less expensive .bike versus 67.6% for .ventures). To the contrary, Donuts think more expensive domains will renew higher, other factors being equal, as the registrants have ascribed more value to those names. But to date there isn’t enough data to support that prediction yet.What is clear, Donuts note, is the relationship between renewal rate and usage. 30 percent of .bike domains so far have real, multi-page content or redirect to such content, whereas for .ventures that number is 19 percent. .BIKE owners are putting up more content, more quickly, and as a result they are renewing more. Results for other TLDs in this batch (CLOTHING, PLUMBING, SINGLES, etc) support the common sense conclusion that TLDs with more usage renew more. To give you some context for these usage numbers, all the names in the COM/ NET zone have about a 50 percent usage rate while the 40 million or so .com/.net names that were newly registered in 2014 their usage level is lower at 39 percent.This doesn’t mean .bike will necessarily have a higher renewal rate than .ventures 12 months from now. Donuts suspect it may mean that .bike owners are smaller, newer and more nimble companies than .ventures owners and are therefore publishing content more quickly. Something to keep in mind, for all TLDs, is that end-users tend to be very slow at turning domains into website content. It is not uncommon to see six months delay between domain purchase and website activation.
Donuts New gTLD Renewals Continue Around 70 Percent But With Variations
Donuts new gTLDs have been continuing to have renewal rates of around the 70 percent mark after six days from when renewals started commencing.
