Sobering figures for new Top Level Domains

Registrations into the first new top level domains (TLDs) like .guru or .plumbing are not exactly skyrocketing and hard-fought protection mechanisms do not seem to attract sizeable interest. Even after the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) allowed competitors of the old heavyweights .com or .fr to enter the domain name market, the several hundred applicants need one asset in particular: .patience. Some applicants took an ephemeral first look back over the new TLD application progress during the Domain Pulse in Salzburg, Austria, last week.

Half a million registrations in the new .ngo name: that is what Ulrich Retzlaf from Public Interest Registry (PIR) is looking for. “It is what we need to make it work,” he said during the meeting.

.ngo hopes to attract at least some of the over 10 million non-governmental organisations. PIR, a not-for-profit corporation created by the Internet Society (ISOC) to manage the .ORG in 2002, has travelled the world to develop a database of NGOs to allow some sort of validation for the .ngo-registrants. That feature potentially would be welcome by donors in a world where fraud organisations has been set up to receive money out of long term development programmes, as well as of short-term donation campaigns following natural catastrophes, PIR hopes.

More but smaller registries

“Applicants have expected 220,000 registrations, and 4 million US dollars in revenue per year,” Dirk Krischenowski, partner of the consulting agency dotzon. “What's really happening is more like 30,000 registrations and 600,000 dollars.” Krischenowski, who also founded dotBERLIN (.berlin will be available March 18), considers that smaller applications still can work out. “There will perhaps not be left that much for investors, but the registry still can work based on 30,000,” he figured.

Krischenowski looked at the growth of several existing TLDs that were introduced during the second of two earlier application rounds - used to test the waters for new TLDs - and calculated that the number of registrations on day 1 of public availability was around 50 percent of registrations sold during the first month, and the number of registrations over the first month was 50 percent of what a registry could sell over the first year, give or take. The numbers of TLD considered was small. Still, the pattern looks the same for different domain names, regardless of the difference in absolute registration numbers.

At the same time, some absolute numbers of new TLD are quite low, to say the least. .coop, introduced in 2013, only has around 7000 names registered. There were only 423 names under .museum and, the Universal Postal Union's .post, after a lengthy application and introduction phase, has allocated about one dozen. To be exact, there were 13 domain names registered in September 2013.

First starters - who will make it?

One had to look much more on the bright side, one of the registry operators present at the Domain Name Pulse said. As of February, according to Krischenowski's figures, .guru was the most wanted of the just started brand new TLDs. After three weeks, 35,000 .guru-domains were registered, resulting in chatter on domaining blogs if .guru might in the end win over .ninja - for which pre-registrations can be made starting April 30.

Most new domains listed by Krischenowski still score below 10,000 registrations. .plumbing is one example. While bravely promoted by registrars like United Domains: “Looking to attract more customers to your plumbing business’s website? A .PLUMBING domain could be just what you need.”, only 2800 plumbers have bought into that opportunity. “We certainly knew that .plumbing would not be that interesting for the German market”, Florian Hitzelsberger, lawyer for United Domains said in Salzburg. On the other hand, he thinks that the so called boutique TLD providers - the providers that have applied for several dozens of new names, will benefit in the long run selling small numbers in large numbers of TLDs over many years.

.voting, .tui and others

Many more names moreover are to come, some, the experts say attracting broader audiences than the plumbing community. Two more aspirants presented their new TLDs in Salzburg. .voting for example hopes to attract not only TV communities like the Big Brother-fans, who vote on who has to leave the camp. At the same time the German .voting-investor wants to offer .voting-names for marketers and for referenda.

Will such a mixed concept work and not drive away each of the very different communites? “I don't think so, we are in talks with celebrities and cities at the same time,” Dirk Hamm, co-founder and CEO of Valuetainment AG, the company behind the .voting venture. The city of Constance, where Hamm's production company Creado (The Life of Others) is based, already has committed to konstanz.voting, Hamm said proudly. Certainly he has another competitor in .votes, applied for by a US company.

Applicants in Salzburg also reviewed the hurdles they faced during the application process. Travel company TUI for example in the middle of their application faced a report from ICANN's geographic name panel that somebody had prior rights to .tui: the Province TUY in Burkina Faso had an ISO 3166-2 code registration for BF-TUI. “We did not know there was such a province,” Alexander Bialas, Senior manager for trademarks, IP- and domain services at the TUI Group said. By chance, a TUI employee received a letter of non-objection from somebody in the embassy in Burkina Faso in Berlin, Bialas reported. TUI hopes that by using .tui, it will strengthen its online marketing potential - including personalised customer websites, and better use of social networks - among other by seeking partnerships with Facebook and Twitter, for facebook.tui and twitter.tui.

Overregulated?

With the start of the new TLDs arriving after a decade of preparations, the debate about the application procedure has not died down. Applicants pointed to the number of “glitches” - as much technical, as process issues. ICANN and its community, including the representatives of ministries in a number of countries, have step-by-step tried to prevent any problem under the new TLDs: from cybergrabbing to financial failures of registries and orphaned domain users. With regard to the first, a long catalogue of intellectual property and name protection measures have been developed: string confusion objections, legal rights objections, limited public interest objection, community objection, trademark clearing house, uniform rapid suspension system or perhaps, even crunchier, a trademark post-delegation dispute resolution procedure.

Statistics of registrations in the trademark clearing house so far have reached 23,000, a negligible number given that there are 1,2 million registered EU trademarks alone. All objection procedures combined drew 263 objections only. Grabbing on the top level had not been an issue at all. These numbers equate to a “slap in the face of the trademark lobby,” said Florian Hitzelsberger, author of the blog domain-recht.de and lawyer at German registrar company United Domains. Hitzelsberger acknowledged that some considered the trademark problem with new global TLDs completely overblown. Yet, to avoid yet another round of “we need more protection against abuse”-talks, he hoped companies would protect their names based on the many options available now. Preventing every and all abuse or financial failure of some of the hundreds of new TLDs will not be possible even with the tightest of regulations – mind you new starter .plumbing with his 2,800 registrations has still a long way to go to recap the application fee of 180,000 US dollars in the first place.