New gTLD .WHOISWHO went into general availability phase on March 2. It is administered by Neustar, the annual fee varies from $90 to $99. The phrase Who is who is widely used by many information services, primarily - biographical ones. However, .WHOISWHO domain, alas, haven’t sparked any interest among the public.
After two days of general availability period only 21 names were registered in the domain zone, this figure includes names registered during the Sunrise period. This is absolutely the worst result among all new gTLDs so far. As of March 5, the number of registrations in the .WHOISWHO domain, however, have increased a little bit and has reached 24, but this figure is dramatically low anyway.
Marina Nikerova, senior deputy director at Technical Center of Internet, believes that the situation is quite natural: «It has become clear now that companies that filed applications for the new domains misjudged their potential. Very often applicants just counted how many people could be attributed to one group or another, the interests of which this or that domain zone represents. Marketing experts and researchers haven’t thought of whether people really need a domain space for their projects. As a result a big number of new domains received significantly less registered names that originally planned.»
