Tag Archives: .WANG

New gTLD Registrations Surge Past 6 Million With More Winners and a Few Losers

New gTLD registrations are still surging upwards with the six millionth registration occurring on 7 June according to nTLDstats.com. Currently there are over 6.033 million domains registered.The six million registrations are across 650 gTLDs, although 281 of these have less than 100 registrations with the bulk of these still in their Sunrise periods or are brand gTLDs. And 104 have more than 10,000 registrations.So there have been quite a few winners. And a few losers. Among the winners is .xyz, the market leader in the total registration count with well over 960,000 registrations. And even though it is estimated several hundred thousand of these were given away for free, it would still be far and away the largest gTLD when it comes to paid registrations.Second on the list of total gTLD registrations is .网址 (.website) however almost all of these registrations are to one registrar and it’s difficult to know how what they’re being used for. Third is .science that has gained close to 300,000 registrations in under four months with one registrar accounting for 85 percent of all registrations.Fourth is one of the big success stories – .club. The gTLD boasts that their 247,000 domains, along with all of the Donuts domains across their gTLDs, are fully paid for. Fifth is .party and it, like .science, has the same registrar making up 90 percent of its 187,000 registrations.The Chinese .wang is sixth with 173,600 registrations and appears to be doing well while .berlin is seventh but this includes a number of free domains. From a peak of over 157,000 registrations it is now down to 153,200 registrations three months into the first of the renewals. But next week over 60,000 domains that were either given away or sold cheaply come up for renewal and undoubtedly it will take a hit. But even if none of these are renewed, an unlikely worst case scenario, it would still be the eleventh largest of the new gTLDs.Rounding out the top ten are .top (129,300 registrations), .link (120,100) and .realtor (102,500). The latter’s numbers though are one of the more unlikely to be sustained. The registry operator has given away domains to real estate agents across North America, but with highly restrictive conditions, it’s unlikely that many will put up money when it comes time for a paid renewal.The .nyc gTLD is also performing well in eleventh place with 79,400 registrations, while .click (69,800) and one of the earliest gTLDs and a Donuts gTLD .guru (69,000) are also doing well.Indeed, while there are some that one could argue should have or could have done better, or even much better, the only other gTLD whose numbers one could question is .ovh among the top 103 with registrations above 10,000. The .ovh gTLD has close to 63,300 registrations but 90 are reserved and the rest through one registrar. And none appear to have been paid for.The most successful backend registry is Donuts with 1.365 million registrations across 186 gTLDs while CentralNic has 1.106 million registrations across 22 gTLDs followed by Neustar with 933,400 registrations across 48 gtLDs then ZDNS (588,100/14), Uniregistry (445,800/21), Rightside (281,500/36), Afilias (212,500/64), TLD-BOX (207,400/7) and Minds + Machines (199,645/24).Some of the losers would appear to be .whoswho, never likely to have big numbers of registrations, but seven months into General Availability has 61 registrations. And while there are others with lower numbers, .rich hasn’t proved very rich with 406 registrations so far and .HIV has struggled with the registry operator now offering the gTLD for sale hoping their unique model for raising funds for charity has some appeal to a larger registry that bring some economies of scale to the project. And in the battle of Democrat v Republicans, the Democrats are winning with 1,356 registrations to 805. But it couldn’t be said either has set the political establishment alight!

.WANG – 15,000 Registrations on Day One of General Availability

[news release] Zodiac Registry is pleased to announce that 15,000 .wang domain names have been registered during the first 24 hours of its General Availability, which started on 00:00, June 30, Beijing time. Within the first 2 hours, more than 7,000 domain names were taken.

“We are very pleased with our day one performance in an unprecedented and over-crowded new gTLD launch space”, commented Eugene Li, CEO of Zodiac Registry, “thanks to our team and our partners. It’s an impressive debut, considering the market conditions and the constraints we have.”

.wang is the first Zodiac-operated gTLD that has entered General Availability. An ingenious Chinese pinyin with multiple meanings, .wang’s successful launch demonstrates its appeal to not only the Chinese but also to the broader market.

“This is a good start”, says Eugene Li, “but it’s just the beginning. We are continuing to expand our registrar network and we hope by the end of this year, .wang will be among the top five new gTLDs.”

Dubbed “the king of the net”, .wang has no registrant eligibility criteria so it is open for everyone to register. It is also strategically priced as an affordable new gTLD. Only a very small number of premium names are reserved by the registry so many great domain names, including three-character ones, are still available.

About Zodiac Registry

Zodiac Holdings Limited and its affiliates were founded in 2008 in anticipation of the launch of the ICANN new gTLD program. Zodiac is the single largest new gTLD applicant with a total of 15 applications that are uniquely positioned to serve the Chinese speaking Internet users around the globe. Zodiac has a core team of domain industry veterans with its headquarters in Beijing.