Morning Folks!!
The Movers and Fakers™ It's a race to the bottom. A race of survival. A demolition derby. The big loser......unsuspecting "Domain Investors" and CHEAP startups making bad decisions and getting a start on the wrong leg.
Both .xyz and .icu hit about 6.7 million registrations as a high. .xyz hit their high of 6.7 Million and change in December 2016. .icu hit their high of 6.7 Million domains registered in March of 2020. Each has now shed over 3 Million domain registrations since their "Respective" highs.
And we are far from done. .xyz still has 284,000 upcoming deletes and .icu has a whopping 1 million more deletes coming on the heals of a whopping 3.2 million drops since last March. .xyz has 2.94 domains left in the zonefile and .icu about 2.3 million.
The two gTLD leaders are sinking! But wait there is more. When you peal back the onion, the largest domain registrar in the world has less than 10% of the .xyz regs and when it comes to .icu 192 total domains registered.
The next high flyer that is crashing is .Top. After hitting 3.8 Million registrations in December 2018, they have managed to drop 2.2 million names and are now sitting under 1.6 Million with 244,000 still to be deleted. Just 1.33 Million in the zone file.
That's a meltdown by any measure!
To me, these are all "MOVERS and FAKERS!" That's my PROFESSIONAL and PERSONAL opinion soley based on my knowledge of NUMBERS!
Then you have .site. After hitting its peak of 2.14 Million regs in late September 2020 it has been downhill. Now 1.7 million Registrations with 261,000 upcoming deletes. 1.253 Million left in the zonefile.
Next up is .vip. After reaching a high of 1.5 Million registrations, it now has a little over 1 Million with 127,000 upcoming deletes.
Then of course we have .Club. They have done more outreach and marketing then all the other stinkers combined. But even with that, they have truly struggled to maintain 1 million registrations. They have 1.1 million domains registered with over 60,000 upcoming deletes. A far cry from the 7 million originally promised.
.work is up next. Sitting in 10th place. They hit a high of about 750,000 names in November 2020. Now sitting at 566,000 in the zonefile.
.app hit their high just in late January of this year with 771,000 names registered. Today at 716,000 in the zone file.
But there is a little bit of a bright spot. Of the top 10 gTLD losers, there is one not doing bad! .online has been the healthiest. Hitting their top just days ago on February 1 of 1.95 million registrations. The growth has been steady. Today they have 1.7 Million in the zonefile with 129,000 deletes.
.shop is a little choppy and not as strong as .online but with over 800,000 registrations and only 33,000 upcoming deletes, it shows signs of life. But don't confuse "Signs of life" with something worthy of investment.
Now of course numbers don't tell the whole story but only a total fool would ignore more than HALF the story!
These are the top 10. The leaders. The movers and shakers or as I refer to most of them as the "movers and fakers™"!
I am a numbers guy. Have always been, will always be. Numbers don't lie, PEOPLE LIE!! It appears they have had more deletes than registrations now. Isn't that a wonderful place to be for "Emerging Technology"?
I am a lone voice and of course I get LOTS of pushback from a multitude of different groups, companies and domainers. But while they whine, I just state facts and numbers. Its all right HERE!
And while they will attack me personally, what they can't do is attack the facts. I am sorry the numbers are not convenient for them. TOUGH! The 7 years of pointing out many of the pitfalls instead of overcoming those pitfalls. They have never directly refuted my points because there are too many to choose from. They pick 1 or 2 and IGNORE a hundred others because they have NO ANSWERS!! What I have predicted has unfolded as predicted. What they predicted, never happened then fell apart and never materialized! It's all on record!
Sure, dotcom is dead is the chant from folks losing their shirts. 51% of the universe uses a dotcom domain extension the world over. Almost 100% of the fortune 500. Follow the leaders, don't follow the losers! Good luck to all!!
Rick Schwartz
Paul Kapschock
I am a little embarrassed to say that I never even heard of .ICU.
I thought of “Intensive Care Unit”…not “I See You”….(I just Googled the meaning.)
On second thought, very happy I am Ignorant :)
Bill
“Intensive Care Unit”…not “I See You”, you could think of it either way. I have an ICU domain that’s being used for an “ICU” consulting service, to fix certain specific problems. It works quite well, as many people do have those problems and this service is the “Intensive Care Unit” for that topic.
Bill Roy
IMO, and that is all, the new gTLDs are the modern equivalence of the South Sea Bubble, and yes that therefore would equate to ICANN being the modern day equivalent of the South Sea Company from 300 years ago. But that is just my opinion.
eric
You better learn how to update your old wordpress site and then start talking about GTLD.
Bill
I see this more as a ‘market correction’ than a failure by both of those TLDs. They did something right, or they wouldn’t have had millions of registrations?
By the way, when I did the SEO test of the top TLDs (based on number of registrations), the .XYZ TLD got its pages crawled and indexed faster than any other TLD out there. The site built on an .XYZ domain got its pages crawled and indexed within a few hours, where other TLDs took up to a few days to just get 25 pages indexed in Google.
When it came to rankings in Google, the .ICU TLD did quite well when it came to ranking for its target keyword.
In my opinion, the pricing was the main factor for these, being so cheap, so many could create a massive number of sites, many of which were ‘burner’ domains. You’re going to get that when the pricing is what it is. I don’t have a problem with that.
jeff schneider
Hello Bill.
Phony Metrics are all gTLD proponents have to work with. phony Schilling Sales, tampering with registration #s ,Bait and Switch, You know the usual culprits. JAS
Gratefully, Jeff Schneider (CONTACT GROUP) We don’t Follow, We Create
Jeff Schneider
Hello Bill,
Hello Bill,
gTLD’s are high liability financial instruments that contain crushing Market Internals for start-ups. It is our opinion gTLD’s real PURPOSE is based on a Google Centric LIE. Its time you get educated Bill ! gTLD’s are a fine example of what We call (GHOST Assets) JAS 2/12/2021
Gratefully, Jeff Schneider (CONTACT GROUP) We don’t Follow, We Create
Domainlogist
Domain King is .com!
BullS
“Numbers don’t lie, PEOPLE LIE!!”
Totally agree, that why I have been saying all the time, those fakers love to hide the numbers(hidden Reserve) and love to manipulate the data.
Show us the numbers and let us decide.
eric
Stupid Domainer Article
steve
too bad we couldn’t have shorted these gtlds back in 2014, or whenever they launched
the music men sold some sorry trombones
oom pah pah oom pah pah
ouch
MyMan
Schwartz is always thinking like a prospector in a gold mine, and never like a business man, or a gold mine operator.
Gotta give credit to .xyz crew. They built a $100m registry biz, from a simple idea started at TRAFFIC domain auction.
Jose
I like that it exposes the truth many of us know from other domainers who also say the same but do not publish it,
I’ve invested in gTLD here’s a part: 458.run, goo.today, nl.vacations, ireport.software.
steve fox
that is why i bought wordunscrambler.com instead of a really really cheapo. Price difference was huge but why own pigeon garbage instead of the real and main name.. Seems anything would work so everyone bought and copied and only a few even exist now. Not to mention copying my site makes me mad. But Google now wants to convince you any domain will out rank a domain and even the best named domain.. Aaaaaahhhhhh gooooooogle. I did cut one guy a super break who for 3 years was crying for a domain and then when I quoted him a huge discount he goes can you take blah…..I was like omg this is over. And he is like wait wait and crying/screaming and goes if I can come up with the money and I cut him off and said 3 days. He somehow found the money he said he didn’t have in 3 days……..Go figure. Yes I honored my word….that shmuck