5 new gTLD extensions had their first day of general availability(GA) yesterday including three Geo’s of cities in Africa (Tuesday Africa time) and two by Rightside (NAME)
Including Sunrise registrations by trademark holders, those that paid an extra fee for earlier access through Landrush or the Early Access Program (EAP) here are the totals after the first day of GA:
.Capetown 1,772
.Joburg 1,458
.Market 1,229
.Durban 985
.Mortgage 635
As far as Geo new gTLD domain names these are pretty disappointing results.
According to wikipedia.org:
.Capetown had an estimated population of 3.74 million.
In 2014 Cape Town was named the best place in the world to visit by The New York Times.
The city was recently named as the most entrepreneurial city in South Africa.
“Cape Town is not only the most popular international tourist destination in South Africa, but Africa as a whole”
.Joburg is short for the city of Johannesburg, according to which according to wikipedia.org, is by population, the largest city in South Africa.
According to the 2007 Community Survey, the population of the city of Johannesburg was 4,434,827 and the population of the Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Area was 7,151,447.
A broader definition of the Johannesburg metropolitan area, including Ekurhuleni, the West Rand, Soweto and Lenasia, has a population of 10,267,700.”
Durban has a population of around 3.5 million people.
So for the three cities there is a population of around 12 Million the size of NYC or London and the combined total of 4,500 domain registrations is about 1/8 of the registrations that .London and .NYC had after their first day of GA.
Of course .Africa will be coming up in the future.
As for .Mortgage and .market I think the totals are in line with recent similar strings but obviously far from great.
