Yesterday a new gTLD .MOE entered General Availability. This event receives a lot of attention, mainly, because of the recent statement made by the .MOE Registry. The company expressed confidence that 200 million names would be registered in the .MOE zone.
This confidence is probably based on the popularity of the word “moe” in the youth subculture. In Russia fans of Japanese anime predominantly use the word “moe” to describe charming young heroines of this genre. However, in the Western countries “moe” is a much more popular word used to express excitement and tenderness towards everything that youth slang describes as cute and “mimimi”. Anyway, the first day of registration in .MOE passed without much excitement. Only 1070 names were registered in this domain zone, which is a figure far from the record.
«.MOE is a typical representative of the community-domain, created for the benefit of the members of a particular subculture. In this case it is a subculture of anime fans. Community domains usually occupy a fairly narrow niche, not many names are registered, that is why an initial prediction of 200 million names made by the creators didn't look very plausible. Meanwhile, the domain might find its Russian audience because .MOE is similar to a word мое in Russian, which means “mine”, said Marina Nikerova, senior deputy director at Technical Center of Internet about the launch of a new domain.
