The three most-registered new gTLDs took three very different paths last year

I was talking with a friend over the weekend about the new gTLD program and realized that I never took a step back to look at the numbers now that 2017 is in the books. So I made my way over to nTLDStats.com and took at look at 2017, here’s a view of all new gTLD domain registrations combined. 2017 started with just under 28M new gTLDs registered and ended with just under 24M.

new-gtlds-2017

(Source – nTLDStats.com)

After all was said and done, we’re now starting 2018 with three new gTLDs all neck and neck in the top three spots, .XYZ, .LOAN, and .TOP. What I thought was so interesting about these three gTLDs is that they all took very different paths to get to where they are today. Let’s go through each, I’ll start with .LOAN:

dot-loan-2017

(Source – nTLDStats.com)

It looks like 2017 was great for .LOAN and they clearly had some kind of promotion from Jan through May since this is where the bulk of the growth took place. In 2017 they went from under 1M registrations and ended just north of 2.4M.

dot-top-2017

(Source – nTLDStats.com)

.TOP on the other hand had a pretty rough year going from just under 5M registrations to close to 2M, yes – they lost more than 50% of their registrations. This isn’t wildly surprising given the number of promos that .TOP ran. The question is, when will this bottom out?

dot-xyz-2017

(Source – nTLDStats.com)

Like .TOP, .XYZ also hit the year mark on one of their biggest promotions which took them down from just under 6M registrations in July down to almost 2.5M the next month. Unlike .LOAN though, .XYZ seemed to bottom out in mid-September and actually saw registrations begin to creep back up in Q4 of last year.

So what can we learn from this data? Well I think it’s pretty clear that a lot of the promotional pricing that many new gTLDs have offered does work at boosting registrations at the time, the big question is, how many of those stick a year later? In the case of .TOP it looks like we’re still on a search for the bottom whereas .XYZ seems to have leveled off which means that they could hang onto the top spot for a while longer.

This also begs the question – if .LOAN did grow so rapidly in the first half of 2017 because of promotions they were running, will we see a similar drop like .TOP and .XYZ did in 2018? What do you think? Comment and let your voice be heard!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton