Tomorrow the new gTLD .Pictures launches into general availability  status meaning it can be registered on a first come first served basis.

We have been chatting about plural and singular new gTLD’s for a while as well as vertical competition but with the launch of this new domain name extension we can actually start to see what the effect of these different but similar strings have on the new gTLD program.

.Photos

.Photos was the first of the five to launch on February 26th an is a Donuts extension.

.Photos currently has over 13,000 registrations placing it as the 20th most popular gTLD extension.

.Photos is priced at $17.99 at Godaddy.

.Photos has premium domain names priced at premium registration and renewal rates.

.Pics

.Pics launched on April 15th and is owned by Uniregistry.

The domain is priced at $19.88 at Uniregistry (Godaddy is not selling the extension)

There are over 4,000 .Pics domains registered.

All domains are priced the same but the registry reserved many domains.

An affiliated company North Sound Names has bought some 40K+ domain names in Uniregistry strings but we don’t know how many were bought under this string if any.

.Photo

.Photo also launched with .Pics on April 15th and is owned by Uniregistry.

There are over 8,000 .Photo domain names registered

The domain is priced at $29.95 at Uniregisty.com (extension not for sale at Godaddy)

An affiliated company North Sound Names has bought some 40K+ domain names in Uniregistry strings but we don’t know how many were bought under this string if any.

.Pictures

.Pictures domains are priced at $14.99 at Godaddy.

.Pictures goes into general availability today and its a Donuts string.

I just pulled the zone file and there are less than 200 registrations counting Sunrise and Early Access Program (EAP) registrations.

.Pictures has premium domain names priced at premium registration and renewal rates

We intentionally left .Photograph off the list, although certainly in the vertical we think the buy for this domain is the professional photographer and is a different kind of domain that the other three.

So what can we tell?

Well arguably .Photos is the best of the lot, but first mover advantage is pretty apparent.

Beyond that pricing seems not to be as important.

I’m not sure your going to get a huge increase is registrations because your retail price is $10 more or less than a similar string.

Renewal time will be telling especially when it comes to domains that have premium renewal pricing.