Donuts’ first fresh domain names are starting to drop…
Donuts’ first domain name registrations are starting to drop. Here are initial numbers.
Donuts is releasing renewal numbers for its fresh TLDs daily as the first batch of names exit the auto-renew grace period.
Yesterday, Donuts COO and Co-Founder Richard Tindal blogged results for the 6,352 Donuts domains that exited the grace period as of Saturday. Of these, 85.3% were renewed.
Regarding one third of these domain names were sunrise registrations, which ought to have a higher-than-normal renewal rate. That means the others were bought in Early Access at premium prices. I’m actually a bit surprised that these don’t have a higher renewal rate, but we’re looking at a modest sample size. Early Access domains had a higher first year price, and second year prices revert to normal.
A lot more domain names are regarding to exit the grace period. Today, Donuts will add 22,910 names to the cumulative total. It expects the renewal rate to drop to the mid seventies at that point.
Donuts has predicted an 80% + renewal rate on its domain names in total. It seems that the first batch of names will struggle to hit this number. Even if Donuts hits these numbers overall, it makes sense that the renewal rates on the initial batches of Donuts’ domains is lower. .Guru and .Photography were in Donuts’ first two releases, and these are its two most-registered domain names. The more registrations, the lower the quality of some of the registrations. .Guru in particular will be a challenge. It was one of the first domains to launch and is fairly generic, which led to a lot of speculation.
