Insights into the world of ‘dot brands’

Guillaume Pahud, co-founder of Dot Stories, an activation platform for 'dot brands', provides some analysis on the current state of play of this form of new gTLD.

So far, 589 brands have applied to have their name registered as a ‘dot brand’ top-level domain (TLD) on the internet.

This innovation opens a wide range of use cases and options for these pioneers, but is also disrupting quite a lot the present processes.

In total, 558 brands have signed contracts with ICANN, and as a result are able to launch their domains.

Of those, 289 brands are live—meaning the name has been introduced in the internet’s authoritative database, known as the root zone.

So far, 122 brands operating a ‘dot brand’ have created at least one another domain to go alongside it—in total, 1,787 domains have been created since early February 2016.

In 74% of these cases, the domains have either no content or are redirected to other sites. For example the domain support.microsoft currently redirects to support.microsoft.com.

In total, 64 brands have an active website, meaning that they have created a website with a ‘dot brand’ domain beyond the nic.brand mandatory minimum. That represents a total of 232 websites that can be visited, displaying mainly four types of content:

• 60% of these sites are mini-sites, with limited content and fewer than five pages—including zerotracas.mma and or lifetothefullest.abbott;
• 15% of brands are duplicating existing content under a new URL—that’s the main strategy for Bradesco and CITIC, which owns two active generic TLDs, .citic and .中信;
• 5% are simple waiting pages—domaintest.gmail is a good example;
• Only a few are complete websites, with multiple pages and unique content—that’s mainly the case with mabanque.bnpparibas and home.barclays.

“In 74% of these cases, the domains have either no content or are redirected to other sites.”

Dot Stories gathered information from the brands’ zone files before processing and manually analysing them.

Below are three figures, provided by Dot stories, that detail 'dot brand' trends.

Figure 1: Summary of 'dot brand' domains

Figure 2: 'Dot brand' activity by sector 

Figure 3: Global regions with the most 'dot brand' websites

Dark green = more sites

Light green = fewer sites

Guillaume Pahud is the co-founder of Dot Stories, an activation platform for ‘dot brands’. He can be contacted at: guillaume@dotstories.com