Brand protection and domain name registrar, CSC (Corporation Service Company) has issued its “New gTLD Utilization Report” for November.
According to CSC the number of active” .brands new gTLD’s (those with five or more registrations) increased from October when there were 53 .brand new gTLD’s with five or more registrations to 75 in November, representing a 42% increase.
According to the report there are now 6,654 new gTLD domain names in the Alexa top 1,000,000 up from 5,340 in October, which is an increase of 25%.
In CSC’s Alternative Top 10 which considers Alexa rankings alongside the TLD’s registration volume, seven of the 10 remained in the list from October (.media, .news, .today, .sexy, .tokyo, .life, and .website).
The new entrants to the list in the top 10 for November were .social, .site, and .space,
.ninja, .link, and .zone dropped out of the top 10.
“”.Media maintained its #1 position in the Alternative Top 10 with .news roaring to the #2 spot as we predicted in our last report. Other TLDs that showed the greatest increase in their New gTLD Indicator scores were .trade, .tech, and .online, while .xyz’s score marginally increased from 20 to 21.
The CSC report for November contains a special section on the China market:
“The recent appreciation in market value of two and three-letter .com domains and Google’s launch of abc.xyz
has fueled speculation in the new gTLDs market, primarily by investors in China. According to a recent
State of the Domains article, “The Steady Rise of the New TLDs and China’s Clout,” China’s share of the new gTLD market stands at 36%.
To investigate further, we conducted an analysis of the Top 20 TLDs by Chinese market share alongside registration volume and CSC’s New gTLD Indicator scores. We found that where Chinese registrants represented over 50% of the market share for the TLD (namely in .ren, .xin, .网址, .wang, .win, .top, .party, .date, .xyz, and .science), utilization according to CSC’s Indicator score is currently very low, with the exception of .xyz”
Combined with the recent spike in new gTLD registrations, I think this data shows just how quickly new domains are gaining traction with businesses/consumers. It’s becoming more and more clear that legacy domains simply can’t handle the accelerated growth of new Internet users.