The first day of General Availability phase of six new gTLDs administered by Minds + Machines should be considered unsuccessful. These domains are .country, .cooking, .vodka, .rodeo, .horse and .fishing. The registrar laid big hopes on them. However, as of yesterday a start of general availability phase didn’t cause too much interest in users and domain investors. Only 1694 names were registered in the six domains altogether. And even considering sunrise and landrush phases total number of names in these zones does not exceed 2000.
The latest circumstance, by the way, is very strange as well. Especially, if we take into account that preliminary registration applications were accepted by Minds + Machines for these domains since November, 2013. In comparison, domain .vegas that started at the same time as Minds + Machines domains got 2933 names. A total number, including sunrise and landrush is 3903 names.
Andrei Kolesnikov, director at Coordination Center for TLD RU, believes that there is nothing unexpected in these results: “It was noted before that the majority of new domains are niche, dedicated to linguistic, geographical or professional communities, this is why they have a fairly small potential audience. When new domains have appeared, registrar business has changed. New zones are a “long tale” – it is a range of products, each of them brings small profit, but altogether this could be significant revenue for the company. Results of Minds + Machines domains clearly show this.”
