What Do People Think About New Top Level Domains?

It’s been over a year since the first new top level domains (the bit on the right of the dot) became available to register by businesses and individuals around the world.

We’ve been offering them to our clients since June of this year and currently offer around 200 different domain name extensions. (We’ll be adding more over the next few weeks and months, though we’re currently focussed on improving the “experience”)

It’s very hard to know what people really think about domains when you work in the space. It’s very easy to make silly assumptions.

So a couple of days ago I launched a small survey via our social media channels, as well as my own personal ones.

The number of respondents was very small, so I wouldn’t consider the responses to be that “meaningful”, but the responses were interesting enough to merit a short blog post.

The questions asked were pretty simple:

• Do you have any domain names? – if you don’t have any domain names then that’s good to know, but there’s no point asking about new TLDs
• How many domain names do you have? – the average person or business doesn’t have that many domain names, while domain geeks and investors will have a much larger number
• Have you heard about new top level domains? ICANN has allowed the introduction of hundreds of new top level domain names (ie. the bit on the right of the “.”) – that question is pretty self-explanatory.
• Have you registered any new top level domains? eg. .website, .club, .social
• Do you think you would register a new TLD (eg .club .social or .website) domain?

So what were the responses?

10% of respondents didn’t have any domain names, but those who did had quite a few:

And most of them knew about the introduction of new TLDs:

When it came to their attitudes about registering new TLDs, however, the answers were quite different. Most of the respondents hadn’t registered any new TLD domain names:

Of course just because you haven’t registered a new TLD yet doesn’t mean that you wouldn’t consider doing it in the future. Most of the respondents weren’t averse to registering new TLDs in the future:

It’d be interesting to run the same sort of survey and get a much larger data set of results, so we’ll probably tweak the survey a little and possibly include in our next newsletter.