nameDesk published a very detailed guide on the upcoming new gtld round. How it’s going to work, numbers, timelines etc…
From the post:
What 2012 teaches
The 2012 round drew 1,930 applications covering 1,408 unique strings. ICANN revealed the list in June 2012, the first new TLDs went live in October 2013, and 484 were in the root by the end of 2014.
The big money showed up in contention. When several applicants wanted the same string, they either worked it out privately or went to auction, and the auctions produced the biggest prices in the history of the namespace: .web sold for $135 million in July 2016. (The buyer still hasn’t launched it.)
That playbook is dead now. In 2012, losing a private auction was itself a business: applicants who bowed out walked away with a share of the winning bid, and some filed with exactly that outcome in mind. This round, ICANN prohibits all of it. No private auctions, no settlements, no joint ventures, no compensation for withdrawing. If a contention set doesn’t resolve through community priority, it goes to an ICANN auction, and nobody gets paid to lose.
Why this round is different
New TLDs got off to a rough start. Registrations grew quickly to about a fifth of .com’s size by 2016, then went sideways for eight years. A lot of that early volume was penny promotions that never renewed.
That changed around 2023. New gTLDs hold 56 million registrations today, a third of .com’s count, and the recent growth comes from extensions people actually use: .shop, .store, .online. Whatever you think of any individual application, this round is launching into the strongest demand new TLDs have ever seen.