The brand protection and domain name registrar CSC published its New gTLD Utilization Report for September late last week and had some interesting findings.
We picked through the report and found what we believe are the highlights.
You can review the entire report here.
CSC publishes a New gTLD report every two months, and it’s “designed to update digital marketers and their peers in legal and IT about how new gTLDs are being adopted,we examine how .brand domains are being used and how effectively the top new generic TLDs are penetrating the Alexa top one million websites ”
According to the CSC report the number of domain registrations of .brand/closed TLDs are continued to increase significantly and increased by 22% since July exceeded 2,500 domains.
“Here a few new examples of .brand utilization:
http://assurance.maif
(French insurance provider)
http://team.suzuki
(Japanese vehicle manufacturer)
http://convertible.mini
(German automobile manufacturer)
http://challenge.samsung
(South Korean multi-industry conglomerate)
http://home.kred
(PeopleBrowsr online influence measure)
According to the CSC report “the most commonly used terms to the left of the dot (with three or more references) are: nic, www, home, mail, support, travel, about, news, shop, foundation, group and business.”
According to the report here are the top .Brand new gTLD domain names with the highest Alexa ranking:
Alexa position TLD
4,771 mabanque.bnpparibas
(French bank & financial services company)
40,118 www.goo
(Japanese internet services provider)
61,865 mabanquepro.bnpparibas
(French bank & financial services company)
83,004 home.barclays
(British financial services provider)
174,221 study.monash
(Australian university)
193,446 home.barclaycard
(British payment provider)
242,105 mabanqueprivee.bnpparibas
(French bank and financial services company)
266,468 loja.globo
(Brazilian media conglomerate)
514,039 somethingincommon.mango
(Spanish fashion company)
515,222 newstoprotect.axa
(French insurance group)
“The Brand Advisory Team at CSC Digital Brand Services continues to monitor with interest how .brands are performing in search.
We have looked at a few .brands that either have an Alexa ranking or were referenced above as new examples of .brand
utilization to see which keywords they are ranking with in Google.
Non-branded keywords do not appear to be significant drivers of traffic in search
We will continue sharing observations for the Top 100 New gTLDs by registration volume.
Our New gTLD Indicator helps gauge the relative value of the new gTLDs and compares them with .com. We are aware that factors such as TLD launch dates will skew the results a bit in the short term and that certain TLDs require special
consideration.
Since our last report, Google announced a reorganization into a holding company called Alphabet with its primary domain name
a generic new TLD: http://abc.xyz.
The new domain already has a Top 15,000 Alexa Ranking and ranks in search for the below keywords
The pace that the domain name was indexed shows there is no competitive disadvantage in launching a new website on a new gTLD
There are many other examples of new gTLD utilization by major brand owners, and the website “Domains in the Wild” at InTheWild.Domains does a nice job collating creative uses of domains.
Here are a few that piqued our interest recently:
http://ikea.today
http://delsey.paris
http://scuderiaferrari.social
http://thehungergames.movie
In CSC’s Alternative Top 10, which considers Alexa rankings alongside the TLD’s registration volume, seven out of the top 10
TLDs remained the same however new entrants to the top 10 are:
.life
.link
.tokyo
The 3 new gTD’s that dropped out of the top 10 were:
.website
.pics
.space
.media lost its consecutive #1 spot to .sexy
Since our last report, .sexy and .news showed the greatest increase in their New gTLD Indicator scores.
We wouldn’t be surprised to see .news cracking our Alternative Top 10 in the near future.”
CSC ALTERNATIVE TOP 10 TLD:
Number of domains in Alexa 1M Number of Domains New gTLD Indicator
.sexy 87 24,563 86
.media 67 20,126 81
.today 140 47,430 72
.wiki 31 11,950 63
.zone 29 14,055 50
.ninja 105 51,969 49
.life 45 24,666 44
.link 285 156,888 44
.social 24 14,988 44
.tokyo 73 41,534 43
Bah! – all these tgld’s suck
The media hype actually contributes to abc.xyz getting a lot of traffic thereby boosting its alexa ranking.
http://www.goo is the perfect exemple that .brands sucks. Why not using goo.com? www has died .
I think the average price of new tld registrations x the number of registrations is a truer indicator of perceived tld value. 20,000 registrations at $100 per domain is a much better indicator of quality and desirability than 60,000 domains reg’d at $1.00. With .news, that particular tld has no rival in its space. The cities in .news are priced very high, but they represent a great opportunity if obtained at the right price.
No idea why the industry uses the Alexa ranking as measurement of popularity. It’s common knowledge that after the top 1.000 the data is simply too limited in scope to provide anything useful. Just have a look at the top 10 TLDs. Where is .club for instance? This is by far the TLD used for most “serious” new websites.
It’s time for the industry to develop a new index. What I think would be interesting is to see how often new TLDs pop up in Google Serps, and which TLDs those are. That will certainly show real websites in use instead of all the parked pages you can find in the Alexa top 1M. Maybe a job for DNA?
I agree, Chistopher. The time is ripe for new work in that area.
Xavier
There is actually a .goo new gTLD but its not owned by Google
https://gtldresult.icann.org/applicationstatus/applicationdetails/329
Interesting report.
A dot news sighting on a local news station is:
ang.news
which redirects to its youtube channel – great application for a dot news!