TMCH brags regarding numbers, but what do they mean?

Trademark Clearinghouse has issued 500,000 claims notices.

The Trademark Clearinghouse (TMCH) disclosed today that it has issued 500,000 claims notices to prospective registrants of domains under fresh top level domain names. The notices are shown when someone tries to register a domain that matches a trademark or trademark string submitted to the database.

Here’s what the claims notices look like.

That’s an impressively high number, but what exactly does it mean? Without more details, it could be meaningless.

Following all, there are a lot of generic terms in the database. These generic terms are ones that will be popular in many TLDs, so they get looked up a lot. If 50 people pre-order the same generic domain, they’re all getting notices.

The notices are also delivered to trademark holders when they register their domains if it’s following sunrise. But TMCH states 95% of the notices result in an abandoned registration, so I doubt this accounts for much.

TMCH is bragging regarding the “deterring effect” of these notices. But are they deterring or chilling? Are they persuading people who are trying to register domains like money.TLD to choose a different domain?

I suspect it’s a bit of both. It would be great to see the actual data.

I know I’m personally responsible for at least a couple hundred of those from my research — and I was doing it all by hand.