Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty Images

If you’ve ever tried to register a website, you’ll likely have been confronted with a slew of odd alternative endings to the traditional dot-com.

These generic top-level domain names (new gTLDs) such as dot-online and dot-top promised to open up the internet, but they had a false dawn. Five years ago a tranche of them were released for purchase, and the expected flood of new registrations failed to materialise.


“Fifteen or 16 years ago, dot-info and dot-biz were the only ones available and they sold millions,” says Kevin Murphy, the journalist behind Domain Incite, which reports on the ups and downs of domain name registration. “When you have 600 come out in the space of a few years, there isn’t that kind of scarcity.” That’s something domain name consultant Jean Guillon agrees with. “The market is crowded with new extensions and users don't know which one to choose from,” he says.

But the latest registration figures released by Verisign, an internet network company that oversees some domain name endings, seem to indicate that after a rocky few years, new gTLDs may finally be finding their niche in the marketplace. 2019 could be the year of the obscure domain name.

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Registrations for new gTLDs rose by nearly 11 per cent in the last year, compared to an average 3.5 per cent increase across the entire domain landscape, according to Verisign. One in five domain name registrations in the last year were on new gTLDs.

“The numbers are picking up as well as the usage,” says Thomas Keller of 1&1 IONOS, a German web hosting company. In part that’s down to saturation in more traditional domain name endings like dot-com, and country code TLDs (such as .uk, .tk and .cn). It’s difficult to get good, precise and short dot-com domain names now, but hyper-specific and new gTLDs still have plenty of choice. Around ten per cent of new URLs registered through 1&1 IONOS were for new gTLds, Keller says.


The five-year lag is to be expected, he adds. “There’s an adoption cycle where you have to break the ice at first and then it becomes more commonplace.” Buyers have more confidence in the legitimacy of these new endings: renewals of 1&1 IONOS’s new gTLDs are performing up to the level – and in some cases better than – traditional TLDs.

His company is also getting better at winnowing out the lesser-used new gTLDs and only offering a handful, rather than hundreds, of relevant endings, to users.

Buyers may be recognising the benefit these new gTLDs provide, says Guillon: precision and availability. “That’s what new gTLDs offer,” he says. “The dot-com domain name extension doesn’t offer that.”

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Guillon recently availed himself of the benefits these new domain name endings offer, swapping his official consulting website from a dot-com to a specific dot-consulting URL. He’s one of several categories of buyers of these newer, more specific domain endings. “Image and descriptiveness is better than SEO,” he believes.


Keller also explains that these new gTLDs offer brand owners the ability to personally brand their website. Companies like Nike may move to dot-nike domain names, rather than relying on dot-com. Around half of the 1,700-odd applications made to ICANN, which oversees the distribution of these endings, in the last round were brand-related. (ICANN has recently tussled with European regulators around privacy for domain name owners under the Whois identifying scheme.) The next round of domain ending disbursements, due around 2021 or 2022, could be even more brand-led. “Their main thing is not just the marketing assets of it, but being able to control something from the very beginning to the end,” says Keller.

Not everyone is so sure, however. While Google and parent company Alphabet have recently made two big indications of support for new gTLDs by hosting their overarching website for Alphabet on the abc.xyz domain name and rolling out the ability for users to create new Google Drive files by typing docs.new into their web browser, these may be of limited use.

“Docs.new is useful but it doesn’t translate into selling a million domain names,” explains Murphy. And Alphabet’s website behind hosted on a dot-xyz domain is a rarity. “Abc.xyz is probably the only useful semantic version of that ending,” he says.

Murphy reckons Google is the best example: they own a couple of dozen new gTLDs, but have only allowed open-market registration for around half a dozen endings. “They’re not in any mad rush to put them out there,” he says.

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So while – five years after they first came onto the market – these new specialised domain name endings may be finally gaining a foothold in the market, there’s still some way to go. “Elon Musk just spent $11m on tesla.com,” says Murphy. “He thought the dot-com was still worth that much money.”

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