Did you really expect all the new gTLDs to be a success?

So it’s no secret that new gTLDs have been in the news even more than usual lately. A lot of this was kicked-off earlier this month when Frank decided to increase the renewal prices on a bunch of new new gTLDs which seemed to ripple through the domain industry in a major way. I wrote an article titled, “Did Frank just burst the bubble?” which definitely created a fair amount of controversy with 29 comments and one comment which called me a cheerleader…

cheerleader

I guess I have to repeat myself over, and over, and over again until it hits home, so here we go. I think that most new gTLDs will fail. Yes, I said it, and I’ll keep saying it until everyone reads it. What the heck are the chances that over 1,000 new domain extensions will be a homerun? Slim to none.

That being said, I do think it’s realistic and probably damn important for our industry as a whole that at least some of the new gTLDs do take off. I also think there are some good examples of new domain extensions that are seeing real momentum like .CLUB, .XYZ, and .SITE to name a few. You can keep track of the leaderboard on one of my favorite sites, nTLDstats.com. Here’s the current top ten:

top-ten-newgtlds

So here’s my question for the all the new gTLD naysayers…sure, a ton of these new domain extensions will fail, and fail big…but did you really expect them all to be a success?

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton