Wednesday, September 10, was the first day of the General Availability period for a new domain zone .LONDON. Analysts waited impatiently for this event, because they consider the domain to be one of the most promising among all gTLDs. Promotion of the domain preceding the launch is believed to be exemplary. We can state that the domain did not disappoint. As of yesterday, almost 35 thousand names were registered in .LONDON. 22547 were registered during combined sunrise/landrush phase, 12421 more were registered yesterday.
Thus, .LONDON has already set a record among new gTLDs, it has beaten .在线 («online» in Chinese) and .BERLIN, that as a result of the first day of General Availability had 33012 and 31645 registered names respectively. Also, domain of the British capital became 11th domain among all gTLDs by the number of registrations. It should
be noted, that registration fee in .LONDON domain zone is rather high and ranging from $48 to $60 per year in different registrars. Nevertheless, the domain has missed its targets. In July of this year representatives of the .LONDON domain zone operator Minds + Machines announced that they expected 50 thousand registrations after the first day of General Availability period is over. However, the present result is not definite. The thing is that many domain names during the priority period received more than one application. In these situations when neither side proved its priority, the fate of the domains is determined by an auction. It is supposed that the number of such applications is around 7500, this digit can freely be added to existing 35 thousand registrations.
Marina Nikerova, senior deputy director at Technical Center of Internet, highly evaluated the results of the first day of registration in .LONDON domain. She said: “Domain .LONDON’s success was quite predictable: domain’s registry conducted an active promotion campaign, Spring polls showed that London entrepreneurs were enthusiastic about the possibility to register their domains in .LONDON domain zone and associated it with sales growth. Moreover, national domain of Britain .UK is one of the largest national domains in the world and it is getting harder to register “good” domain name in it each year, so .LONDON will come in handy. Obviously, we’ll see truly representative data when users are going to renew registered domains, but for now the rates of registration is impressive.”
