It was back on September 22nd when we posted that 1and1.com, the domain name registration which has been running television commercials in heavy rotation in the United States t0 promote new gTLD domain names broke the 2 Million pre-registration mark.
Tonight 1and1.com blew past the 3 million pre-registration mark some 20 days later.
1and1.com is only accepting 1 domain name registration per domain name so these are 3 million unique domain pre-registrations.
As we have said before there is not cost nor any obligation to pre-register a new gTLD domain name and even if you do have a pre-registration with 1and1.com or another registrar there are plenty of reasons why you may not get the domain you pre-registered and I urge you to read our post on the subject.
There are also many other registrars taking pre-reservations for new gTLD domain names and you can see a list of them here
As of the last Verisign report there are 252 million domain registered in TLD’s and ccTLD’s so 3 Million in that respect is a very small number, yet the awareness that 1and1.com is bring to the general public on the new gTLD’s is more than all other registrars combined and certainly exceeds anything that ICANN has done.
I reached out to 1and1.com and its parent company company to see if I can get any sort of estimate of the media spend on this campaign and did not get an official response but unofficially chatting with some people close to the company, and based on the campaign itself, I would say its at least $50 Million dollars.
I was able to confirm that television ads are also running in the UK and Germany promoting new gTLD domain names.
As for the top 20 new gTLD strings by numbers of pre-registrations they have remained pretty stable throughout but here is the current list:
.app.
blog.
buy.
car.
cars.
church.
eat.
hotel
.inc.
.mobile
.music
.news
.online
.restaurant
.school
.shop
.site
.tech
.web
We will keep watching the space.
No cost to submit a Pre-registration. In other words, no actionable metrics. 3 Million or 1 Billion w/ “zero cost” – what’s the difference?
Let us know when consumers get out their wallets for this highly risky venture. Then we can discuss.
In the VC world, this is what we can pre traction. Call us when you have a lead investor or “serious” metrics. Otherwise, no thanks.
Michael,
If someone is interested in new gTLD do you think he should preregister them?
3 million may look like a lot, but when you factor in that some of the big actors applied for multiple strings:
Donut… 307
TLDH… 92
Famous Four…57
UniRegistry… 54
Radix… 31
UnitedTLD … 26
Google. 101
Amazon… 76
Microsoft. .. 11
With more than 900 strings, we are talking roughly 3,333.33 recurring, per string. That’s not enough to satisfy these giants.
Like me, most consumers are still stuck on RFC920 with former IANA.
When ICANN came in, and dumped aero, biz, coop, info, museum, name, pro etc in 2000, the consumer yawned. That did not deter ICANN, in 2004, they dumped Asia, cat, jobs, mobile, tel, travel…. but now, they’ve gone too far.
It’s an automated counter – not real.
We have been running pre-registrations and invariably, people ‘check all’ and pre-register tens, or hundreds of extensions at once.
If you watch their counter, it goes steadily, one or two at a time, always. Never more than a couple at a time. Which is not a natural progression.
It would be interesting to track the growth of .COM registrations along with the new GTLDs. I believe HosterStats.com shows historical growth of .COM regs. Will the launch of new TLDs result in a decline in .COM registrations or perhaps slow the growth? Or maybe all the advertising of domains will have the effect of generating more interest in domains and result in mushrooming number of .COM registrations and aftermarket acquisitions. Let’s see what happens….
As we sit today .com is at 110,759,851
It crossed 100 million for the 1st time on august 22
http://www.thedomains.com/2013/08/27/breaking-com-domain-name-regsitration-top-110-million-mark-for-the-1st-time/
Go back and check the .XXX registry’s claims as to reservations before launch….ICM Registry had claimed to have over 500,000 of them in March 2011, months before they went live.
i applied for Rick.blog, Ricks.blog…how much u going to pay me rick and do u prefer rick.blog or ricks.blog
i applied for Rick.blog, Ricks.blog … how much u going to pay me rick and do u prefer rick.blog or ricks.blog
A $50 Million ad spend gathers 3 million pre-registrations?
That would be at a cost of $16.67 EACH??? For pre-registrations?
If the $50M figure is accurate from what I’ve heard I think the spend it actually higher but again unconfirmed i’d rather go lower than higher
now the also are getting all the pre-registrants info email phone address and of course the company sells a lot of things including domains, hosting, web site building and is part of the parent company which owns Sedo, but yes it cold be a $20 or more per registrant acquisition cost
most people will use godaddy…
godaddy will do a new gTLDs Super Bowl ad…
i like godaddy…
MB: ” a $20 or more per registrant acquisition cost”
Per lead, these are not sales. So that $20 could work out to many times that much per sale.
if its a fake counter then then whole thing is meaningless.
Obviously I can’t say definitively that it’s fake. But based on my own experience, at least one in 7 pre-registrants attempt to pre-register their sld in every available extension.
If they have spent 50 million though, 3 million pre-regs doesn’t sound unreasonable.
The pattern of their counter just doesn’t seem natural to me. Maybe they have a filtering system so those types of mass registrations aren’t counted.
This is fantastic news for my semi-pronounceable quad premium LLLLL.me domain!!!
Yes per lead would be more accurate
George
I think the number was higher than 500K for pre-registrations for .XXX, I’m still looking for some old emails
However in complete fairness I know that .XXX did accept multiple pre-reservation applications for .XXX so there could have been 100,000 pre-registrations for sex.xxx for example, 1and1.com is only accepting 1 reservation per domain
252 million took 18-20 years roughly at a rate of 14 million a year if we divide it by 18 years. But during the initial years I believe registrations were not much and by that token new-gTLDs may be at favorable point. Over the short run it may perhaps not be able to break the record of today’s figure of 252m for TLDs and ccTLDs but it’s worth to notice that some of these generics may beat the records of some pre-existing TLDs & ccTLDs.
Mike: They told Kevin at DomainIncite that their count was for unique domains, see:
http://domainincite.com/3949-xxx-reservations-pass-half-a-million
“ICM tells me that these are all requests for unique domains, not counting duplicates, and that over 100,000 requests were not added because they did not appear to come from legit sources.”