New gTLD registrations shot past the 30 million mark at the beginning of December and are now approaching 33 million, with 2 million of that increase attributed to the very cheap .icu. .icu is now the largest of the new gTLDs with over 6.1 million registrations and numbers continuing to increase rapidly.
An area where registrations continue to grow is among the .brands. Of the brands that have made best use of their new gTLDs are 2 German companies: the association of German financial advisers Deutsche Vermögensberatung Aktiengesellschaft (DVAG), currently with 3,654 domain name registrations for their .dvag, and the automaker Audi with 1,767. The third largest of the .brands by registration numbers is the French insurance services company MMA IARD with 1,656. Another Germany company and a subsidiary of DVAG, Allfinanz Deutsche Vermögensberatung Aktiengesellschaft, currently has 992 registrations for their .allfinanz. In total DVAG subsidiaries have 5 new gTLDs with their .pohl, .vermögensberatung and .vermögensberater also being delegated but not being heavily used.
Other brands to have significant numbers of registrations are Seat, also part of the Volkswagen Group like Audi, which has 691 registrations for their .seat, Neustar with their .neustar has 656 and Mini, a subsidiary of the German BMW group, with 655 for .mini.
So it’s not surprising that Germany is the country with the most .brand registrations. Industry research in the middle of 2019 showed there were over 7,000 .brand domain names registered in Germany, accounting for around 40% of .brand registrations, followed by the USA with over 3,000 and France (around 2,500). As of the middle of 2019 there were over 17,000 .brand domain names with 11,663 being used, both up 10% in 6 months.
According to nTLDstats, there are now 1,186 new gTLDs delegated by ICANN of which around 500 have made it to General Availability and around 600 are .brands. Anecdotally the use of .brands has been increasing with Katrin Ohlmer, CEO and founder of DOTZON GmbH, recently observing they had “spotted quite a number of .brand domains ‘in the wild’ – in print advertising, on vehicles and social media ads.”
Overall, including .icu, there are 8 new gTLDs with more than one million registrations, the others being in order .top, .xyz, .site, .online, .vip, .club and .wang, and another 23 with more than 100,000.
