In early November, the domain .ONLINE surpassed the yearned-after 1 million domain names mark. .ONLINE is now one of the few new gTLDs with over a million domain names. OnlineDomain.com reports that .ONLINE ranks fifth among the new gTLDs in terms of zone size. The results have already been recorded by the nTLDStats statistics site. Another popular resource, Namestat, still shows that .ONLINE has a little over 900,000 registered domain names, but such discrepancies are not uncommon and largely result from different calculating methods.
The .ONLINE domain was established four years ago in November 2014 when a joint venture of Radix, Tucows and Namecheap won the right to manage the domain at a private auction. Later on, Radix purchased the full rights and is now the domain’s administrator. The term “online” is one of the most popular keywords used in domains all over the world. As of December 2017, approximately 900,000 domain names registered in the traditional domains, such as .COM, .NET, .ORG, .INFO, .US and .BIZ, contained the word “online.” Moreover, two-thirds of them ended in “online.” Over the past year, these domains have seen 130,000 more registrations that ended in “online.”
Speaking about .ONLINE’s growth potential, Sandeep Ramchandani, CEO of Radix, said, “Our goal is to offer customers their ‘first choice name’ for their online identities. Businesses and consumers have long settled for long and less memorable domains on familiar, legacy strings such as .com. With only 1 mln .ONLINE names vs. 135 mln .com names taken, there is ample availability for customers and tremendous growth for us to tap into.”
According to an internal analysis by Radix, 65% of domain names in .ONLINE are used by small and medium-sized business. To date, the domain has generated over $13 million in revenue, of which $1.5 million has come from premium domains. As of now, Radix is working on a large-scale marketing campaign for end users which will launch in the first quarter of 2019.
