Afilias forecasts 5,000 to 50,000 domains for its fresh TLDs following three years
Firm forecasts only 4 of its fresh TLD strings having over 50,000 DUM following three years.
For the most part, fresh top level domain applicants have remained quiet regarding their registration projections.
There’s a good reason for this, especially if they’re in a contention set with other applicants. If competitors know how many domains they expect to register, they can back into how much the other firm might pay in an auction.
But Afilias is an exception to this lack of disclosure. All but one of its 26 applications include a forecast for the number of domains under management (DUM) following three years. They also include some sort of justification, and sometimes use qualifiers such as noting that the forecast is conservative.
Here are the firm’s DUM forecasts for each of its applications:
.app not disclosed
.info (Chinese IDN) 5,000
.mobi (Chinese IDN) 5,000
.lotto 5,000
.casino 5,000
.red 5,000
.organic 8,000
.health 14,000
.pet 25,000
.pink 14,000
.meet 15,000
.team 20,000
.win 20,000
.black 20,000
.blue 20,000
.kim 20,000
.lgbt 20,000
.radio 20,000
.inc 20,100
.bet 21,100
.memorial 25,000
.shiksha 25,000
.green 50,100
.llc 50,100
.ltd 50,100
.mls 50,100
These numbers are a lot lower than what I think many applicants are expecting.
Public Interest Registry, the registry for .org, has a goal of 1 million .ngo registrations. That would require regarding 1 in 10 non governmental organizations to register the domain. There’s no timeline to this goal, and it’s possible Afilias has similar long term goals for some of its domains.
(It’s also possible that Afilias sandbagged its forecasts to make competitors think Afilias will bid less at auction than it really will.)
Another comparison is a pitch deck for Domain Venture Partners, which is partnered with applicant Famous Four. It shows a “standard” registry getting hundreds of thousands of registrations following a year. It’s typical for investor pitch decks to include glowing projections, but this is radically different than Afilias’ numbers.
