Despite political domain name news, political fresh TLDs not taking off

Political fresh top level domain names are not getting much attention.

With all of the news recently regarding presidential candidates not registering relevant domain names, you’d think political fresh top level domain names would see a boost. Yet, they continue to struggle.

Consider Rightside’s .democrat and .republican. The former has regarding 1,300 registrations and the latter just 800.

.Vote also has fewer than 1,000 names in the zone file (and .voto is regarding 250) despite the registry striking deals with states.

.GOP has regarding 3,000, but it’s being offered by a party itself.

If there ever were an example of lack of awareness in fresh TLDs, I’d say this is it. I doubt many of the managers for these politicians have any idea these names are out there.

I checked some of the candidates names in these extensions. Someone had by now snapped up the big ones in .democrat and .republican. Afilias seems to have registry reserved popular candidate names in .Vote, likely with a goal of getting them to use them. (Which is pretty smart.)

Perhaps politicians are just throwing in the towel. Between first names, last names, name2016…it’s hard to cover all your bases.