The Value of New TLDs

Over the last three years, almost 1200 new domain extensions have launched. Together, those domain extensions have yielded over 25 million domain registrations. It's an exciting time for the domain industry - and the Internet. After the introduction of the legacy top-level domains (TLDs) in 1985, there have only been a few other TLD launches. These launches gave us .INFO, .BIZ, and .TEL, among others (not including country code domains). Though no TLD - legacy, country, or new - has been able to rival the popular .COM, that doesn't mean that they don't have value.

With the launch of new TLDs, most central registries chose to set aside predetermined "premium" domain names. These domain names were deemed to be more valuable and sold as such. A never-before-launched TLD has a plethora of opportunities for domain names that have been long registered on .COM. But will these values hold? Only time will tell, but what we do know is that their premiums have been selling.

Take .CLUB - one of the more well-known, better selling new TLDs - which sold over $2.35 million in premium domain names sales in Q4 of last year. And, in Q2 of this year, Rightside, a central registry with several new TLDs in its portfolio, made more than $1 million in premium domain sales. Although they aren't on the same level as some of the highest .COM domain sales, you can see that the new TLDs are showing some impressive numbers in the top 20 list on sold.domains.

Now, another new TLD is getting ready to auction off some of its premium names. The auction will feature a portfolio of premium .BUZZ domains including all 1 and 2 character domains as well as other premium keywords and the minimum reserve bid is $3.5 million. It will be interesting to see what happens with this auction as .BUZZ is much less popular than .CLUB - it only has just under 10,000 registrations compared to almost 900,000 for .CLUB.

Will this be a true test of the value of new TLDs? Will this auction create enough of a "buzz" to solidify the value of new TLDs? Tell us your opinion in the comments.

Post by Robyn Norgan