Everyone in the domaining industry is asking: “How much potential do new TLDs have?” People mainly speculate about the number of registrations, with some gurus discussing brandability etc. Real experts prefer to believe in numbers. Probably the best research done as of today was LDS’s effort to check 5,000 most frequently used domain name prefixes and suffixes. In fact many smart domain name investors took those numers into account while hunting for domain gems in new zones or, few, registering new TLDs altogether.

To give the domainers further numerical support, DNPric.es conducted its own study checking new TLDs versus the past sales. The research focused on two numbers: tail hits, i.e. those domain name sales matching “*tld.*”, and all hits, i.e., matching “*tld*” in general (less those mathces in the tld itself, i.e. not matching “*.tld”). E.g., for .club tail hits would be luxuryclub.com, gclub.com, fitnessclub.de, club.mobi and all hits would also include domain names like golfclubreview.com, countryclubs.com, golfclubs.net, etc.

Among over three hundred thousand domain name sales, DNPric.es found these:

This table explains well popularity of .berlin, .bike, .center, .clothing, .club, .company, .directory, .email, .gallery, .guru, .land, .link, .photography, .photo, .sexy, .solutions, .technology, and .today. All of them have good related sales in the past in old TLDs and hence the market now believes that new TLDs will be as lucrative in the years to come. IDNs fall out of this study, as they are relatively new kids on the block anyway, and there were very few IDN sales recorded so far (DNPric.es lists only 8,655 of them).

No serous study goes without finding some correlation and DNPric.es thinks it has found some. Have at look on the following two charts, one for tail hits:

Tail hits {click on the image to zoom in}

and one for all hits:

All hits {click on the image to zoom in}

For a moment, let us ignore the lower nebulas, as they mainly represent TLDs not fully launched yet. The dependence is obvious: the higher the number of the sales we found, the more new registrations there are in new TLDs.

Now watch .media to go live and come back with updated numbers. Thinking about buying some? – Focus on those TLDs in the bottom right corners.