Donuts released two new gTLD’s into General Availability yesterday (GA) when domains could be registered on a 1st come, 1st served basis.
Including all domain registrations during the Sunrise Period for trademark holders and those who paid additional fees to register domain names before GA, in the Early Access Period (EAP), .Group ended the 1st day of GA with 3,445 registrations according to ntldstats.com
.Salon on the other hand seems have gotten little interest ending with just 364 domain name registrations, including Sunrise and EAP.
Both .Salon and .Group have premium priced domain names.
.Salon maybe become another new gTLD which gets a very low domain registration volume like .Navy which still has only 540 domain registrations and .Airforce which has only 372 domain registrations, both of which were launched in October, 2014 as well as .Memorial which only has 452 domain name registrations since being launched in March 2015.
The domain registrar that has the highest number of .Salon domain registrations is Godaddy with 8.
Yes 8.
There also seemed to be almost no interest from trademark holders for .Salon as the brand protection registrar Mark Monitor only has 4 registrations and CSC only has 3.
Remember each new gTLD has a minimum annual $25,000 fee to ICANN and carried a $185,000 application fee.
In the case of .Salon Donuts won an ICANN auction for the domain extension paying a whopping $5.1 Million for the extension, plus the $185,000 application fee.
Three of the best possible .Salon domain names IMHO are reserved; beauty.salon, hair.salon and nail.salon.
Maybe Donuts will sell those for a lot of money.
