"... Most of these new gTLDs are irrelevant and will never be sold in material volumes. NAME is holding back the growth potential of your registrar by pushing garbage extensions to a user base that quietly knows better ..." --Rightside investor letter (2016) (emphasis added)ICANN could have saved itself (and others) a lot of time and money had it listened to people like Karl Ulrich of Wharton (see above) and others, before dumping 1000+ new gTLDs into the global DNS. On the other hand, ICANN can always find people willing to tell ICANN whatever it wants to hear, for a price. ICANN has a lot of money, and spends a lot of money. Sometimes it pays off, and some times it doesn't.
"Acknowledgments My postdoctoral research project received substantial financial contributions by the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). I would like to explicitly thank Cyrus Namazi and Mike Zupke for supporting this research project and for giving me the opportunity to discuss preliminary results with ICANN ..." Article, embedded below, p. 14 (emphasis and links added).ICANN's new gTLDs were launched two years ago, beginning in 2014, and everyone credible now acknowledges sales have been "disappointing" as compared to original projections. Real data is now available for research and study, but some still base their research on "models" built in an Ivory Tower, which leads to more questions, more research needed.
"More research is also needed to understand the determinants of domain registrations in time. The current study draws its conclusion from one cross-section only. Technological change could reduce the effort required to navigate to a website and might channel more demand to peripheral locations. Examples of relevant technological change include the auto-complete function in the browser’s address bar which automatically fills in any long domain names, in case they have been visited in the past. Additionally, it would be interesting to investigate where unsuccessful registrants turn after not having found a suitable name. The substitution between "owner-occupied" domain space and "rented" locations on e.g. social media platforms is not understood." (source, infra)
Domain Mondo offers for your reading enjoyment, Thies Lindenthal, Monocentric Cyberspace: The Primary Market for Internet Domain Names, The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics (2016). DOI: 10.1007/s11146-016-9547-2:
Note: The above article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). No changes were made.
See also on Domain Mondo: ICANN Damaged a Competitive Domain Name Market With Its New gTLDs
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