Of .travel, .aero, .pro, .museum and more — The fate

A look at domain registrations for some of the less well known top level domains.

A lot of people point to the results of .aero, .museum, etc. as proof that fresh top level domains will be failures.

This isn’t a fair comparison as most of these domains were hampered with restrictions (sponsored TLDs) from the get-go, making it almost impossible they’d succeed.

But since people want to talk regarding numbers, here’s the latest official data on some of the more obscure and targeted top level domains. The most recent data made public by ICANN is from November.

.Pro
120,610 domains (nameservers 217,329)
Biggest registrar – Hostway 43,492

(until recently the .pro registry was owned by the same group as Hostway)

.Travel
26,686 domains
Biggest registrar – Encirca 8,634

.Museum
438 domains
Biggest registrar – DomainBank 275

.Aero
7,718 domains
Biggest registrar – NamesBeyond.com 1,929

.Cat
51,845 domains
Biggest registrar – Nominalia 14,402

(frequently cited as a “success” for a community domain. It also generates > $1 million in annual registration fees)

.Coop
9,470 domains
Biggest registrar – domains.coop 6,829

.Jobs
41,453 domains*
Biggest registrar – NameShare 34,683

(*Nameshare domains are basically registered by the registry, so really there are fewer than 7,000 domains)