French Study Has Some Interesting Assumptions
Afnic the organization that governs the .fr extension put out a report where they took a look at the 50/50 law and how it correlates to new gtlds.
It seems the study refers to a law they say is well known among domain professionals. I am not sure this is well known, if it is true then some new gtlds are in for a tough time. One of the points of the study concerned .club, “The .club TLD will probably join the top three TLDs once the first month of its public opening has been completed.”
.Club is currently in third place for overall registrations according to ntldstats.com. Of course this data is considered bogus by some with the free giveaways in both .xyz and .berlin.
From the study:
There is a well-known “law” among experts of the domain name market claiming that the number of domain names registered by the end of the 1st day of the public opening of a TLD amounts to 50% of the stock that the TLD will achieve by the end of its 1st month, and that the latter number will represent 50% of the stock at the end of the 1st year. To verify this, we performed a full-scale test.
As of June 1, 2014, 46 new TLDs had been open to the public for over a month and had a stock of more than 5,000 domain names (this threshold is arbitrary but limits large variations due to low volumes).
We analyzed their results, provided by ntldstats.com, to verify the 1st statement of the “law” and find out whether the stock obtained at the end of the 1st day of the public opening really represented 50% of the stock at the end of the 1st month.
- To be precise, for 33% of the TLDs studied, the deviation between the actual stock and the target stock is in the range of [-10%; +10%], for 59%, it is in the range of [-20%; +20%], and for 93%, it is in the range of [-50%; +50%].
- It can also be noted that the three TLDs that achieved exceptional results all exceeded their target goal by more than 50%. These are the .guru (+51%), .uno (+55%) and .holdings (+70%) TLDs. The .club TLD will probably join the top three TLDs once the first month of its public opening has been completed.
Read the full story here
It is an interesting article but AFNIC misses the fact that many of these are not ordinary new TLD launches where most domains are available. Due to the registry registrations effectively moving a lot of the high value keyword domains from the set of possible registrations, the Landrush phase is compressed. The normal six month Landrush period is effectively a few months of high (and spikey) daily registration volume falling off sharply at the end of the six month period to a lower and steadier daily rate. The Landrush phase in these new gTLDs is highly compressed and after the initial boost of registry reserved/plundered domain names, the growth effectively collapses to a steady daily trickle of new registrations. When they talk of domain professionals, they are referring to people in the registry/statistical side of the business rather than domainers.