Minds + Machines’ fresh domain names off to slow start

Demand appears to have been low at launch.

Minds + Machines launched its first six owned and operated top level domain names yesterday. The results can only be described as weak, at least based on overnight zone file numbers.

Here’s the activity in the zone files:

.Vodka 421 to 469
.Cooking 378 to 439
.Fishing 350 to 388
.Horse 287 to 327
.Country 182 to 220
.Rodeo 76 to 107

It’s possible that the zone files, which would have captured the first (busy) hours of registration, did not update correctly.

Another explanation is that some registrars might have had trouble processing pre-orders.

Or another, perfectly plausible explanation, is that there just wasn’t much demand for these particular domain names.

Consider that .Fish, which Donuts launched two months ago, has just 1,623 registrations in the zone file to date.

.Recipes, which has been on the market for 5 months and is in the same general category as .cooking, has just 3,074 names in the zone file.

Some of the other domains on the list, such as .vodka and .rodeo, seem more limited in market size than these to examples.

With this in mind, the numbers don’t seem that surprising. It will take strong vertical marketing to get these domain names to take off over time.