According to the Wordldtrademarkreview.com, the new gTLD space for lawyers which highlights .Legal, which is unrestricted and .Law which is heavily restricted have gotten off to a very slow start.
“An analysis of take-up within the two most relevant new gTLDs – ‘.law’ and ‘.legal’ – suggests that law firms are taking a tentative approach to their new gTLD registration strategies, with only a quarter of the sample we studied registering the equivalent of their key domain name in either of the strings.”
“For our research, we focused on the 54 law firms that are agents of the Trademark Clearinghouse, acting on the assumption that they are acutely aware of the ongoing gTLD rollout. We looked at whether they had registered the equivalent of their current main domain name, as well as their full/specific firm name (if different), in the ‘.legal’ and ‘.law’ gTLD strings.”
.Legal is owned by Donuts and went into general availability in March 2015 and has 6,500 registrations .
There are no restrictions for those that want to register a .legal domain
.Law is owned by Minds + Machines and went into general availability at the end of October (with 3,000 registrations at time of writing but can only be registered by licensed lawyers
“The ‘.law’ string has a higher percentage of law firm registrants amongst our sample of those we studied, 28% had registered a ‘.law’ domain name, while 24% had registered in the ‘.legal’ space.
In total, a mere 11% of the firms we surveyed had registered in both strings.”
The story did not cover that there are unrestricted new gTLD extensions of .lawyer and .attorney as well.
As of publication there are some 14,750 domain names registered under .lawyer and 9,700 under .attorney.
There are around 1.2 million licensed lawyers in the world.
You do the match.
There is a finite number of registrants and of course many already have .com domain names and are not rushing to re-brand to a new gTLD for several times the cost of a .com.
Remember Google is also going to roll out a .Esq
As an attorney, I long ago egistered a lot of domain names in the legal space, may of which we sold through the year but we still own many great generics like AccientAttorney.com, DivorceAttorneys.com and RealEstateAttorney.com just to name a few.
Lawyers have not embraced domain names over the years.
As the WTR stated these new domain extensions are off to a slow start, but is not a surprise to those that have been in the domain industry for a very long time.
Knowing what .law sold for in a private auction, at the rate of registrations it will be a generation for anyone involved in that extension to get any rate of reasonable return.
But have many of them English speaking? 10%? How many of them will need a new domain name soon? 1%?
Let’s do the math:
1.2 million * 10% * 1% = 1,200
Plain vanilla calculus. What else?
http://www.smh.com.au/business/graduate-glut-12000-new-lawyers-every-year-20140214-32qnm.html
This is about the 12,000 law graduates each year in Australia alone I think your 1,200 figure is nonsense, DNSal.es, sorry. These will prove to be very popular and profitable long before .com’s inevitable decline. Also, at $200 a pop for yourname.law, it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than buying yourname.com from a domainer!
There are only very few sites with significant alexa rank with the new TLDs. Less then a dozen in total.
http://siterankdata.com/show/extension/legal
http://siterankdata.com/show/extension/attorney
http://siterankdata.com/show/extension/law
I think at a min price of $200/reg
MMX are doing very well out of it….!!
Daniel
Lets not forget that a new attorney out of Australia can also chose in addition to .law, a lawyer, .attorney, .legal .esq and/or a .au domain in addition to .a com
I would prefer the 3 letter ending than the 5,6 or 8 letter others.
I wonder whether they’re looking at the numbers (4145 domains per ntlstats) and already thinking about how they are going to spin this!?
“The CEO of .Law Lou Andreozzi, of LexisNexis North American Legal Markets and the former chairman of Bloomberg Law is quoted as saying he “estimates the U.S. market is about 1.2 million attorneys, while the worldwide market approaches 2 million lawyers. Andreozzi said his goal in the next 12 to 24 months is to reach 10 percent market penetration, or roughly 100,000 .law sales.
http://www.thedomains.com/2015/08/10/law-expects-100k-domain-registration-in-12-24-months-at-200-per/
The NotCom domains are already taking the world by storm, how much time these DotCom dinos need to change..
The world has to change, which is inevitable. Let us have meaningful domains, why do we need that extra COM unnecessarily, pity still people want to pay millions for meaningless domains, thinking that they are easily rememberable, who remembers the domain names at all.