The .News domain extension has been available for people to hand register for just two weeks, and it is already selling more in that time period than other Rightside domain extensions in the same period of time. I was told that 8,790 .News domain names were registered on its first day of general availability.
This afternoon, the company announced that over 15,000 .News domain names have been registered so far in the first two weeks of general availability.
With over 15k registrations .NEWS is our most successful web address 2 weeks into general availability http://t.co/FbtH2HmL1W
— Rightside (@rightside) July 30, 2015
The tweet was a bit confusing at first because I thought the company was saying that .News is their best selling domain extension so far. When I looked at nTLDStats, I saw that .News is the fifth best selling new gTLD extension owned by Rightside, following .Rocks, .Ninja, .Pub, and .Reviews.
Interestingly, there are more .News domain names registered than .Lawyer, .Attorney, .Consulting, and other seemingly popular keyword extensions. Perhaps this can be attributed to the pricing or the number of reserved domain names in each extension, although that is a guess. I looked at Name.com, and .News domain names cost $19.99/year while .Lawyer domain names cost $34.99/year. I am not sure where to find a list of reserved domain names in each extension.
I am not really sure what is driving the registrations beyond those of other extensions, but it seems that .News is going to be a winning extension for Rightside.
So for those who still ask, why should new gTLDs be any more successful than the likes of .info, .biz, etc., it’s time to smell the coffee. Because some of the new ones are a 1,000 times more appealing while those older ones are as appealing as a lead balloon. Which is also why some of the latter practically have to be given away for .99 a pop and such…
http://www.circleid.com/posts/20150727_new_boom_to_come_re_evaluating_the_success_of_the_new_tld_program/
I knew .news would succeed since many media houses and bloggers will like to be associated with it.