It was back on September 22nd when we posted that 1and1.com, the domain name registration which has been running television commercials in heavy rotation in the United States t0 promote new gTLD domain names broke the 2 Million pre-registration mark.
Tonight 1and1.com blew past the 3 million pre-registration mark some 20 days later.
1and1.com is only accepting 1 domain name registration per domain name so these are 3 million unique domain pre-registrations.
As we have said before there is not cost nor any obligation to pre-register a new gTLD domain name and even if you do have a pre-registration with 1and1.com or another registrar there are plenty of reasons why you may not get the domain you pre-registered and I urge you to read our post on the subject.
There are also many other registrars taking pre-reservations for new gTLD domain names and you can see a list of them here
As of the last Verisign report there are 252 million domain registered in TLD’s and ccTLD’s so 3 Million in that respect is a very small number, yet the awareness that 1and1.com is bring to the general public on the new gTLD’s is more than all other registrars combined and certainly exceeds anything that ICANN has done.
I reached out to 1and1.com and its parent company company to see if I can get any sort of estimate of the media spend on this campaign and did not get an official response but unofficially chatting with some people close to the company, and based on the campaign itself, I would say its at least $50 Million dollars.
I was able to confirm that television ads are also running in the UK and Germany promoting new gTLD domain names.
As for the top 20 new gTLD strings by numbers of pre-registrations they have remained pretty stable throughout but here is the current list:
.app.
blog.
buy.
car.
cars.
church.
eat.
hotel
.inc.
.mobile
.music
.news
.online
.restaurant
.school
.shop
.site
.tech
.web
We will keep watching the space.
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