National Public Radio (NPR) covered the new gTLD’s back in April of this year when the new extensions were getting rolled out.
In a year-end segment last week, they did an update on their April story, and checked in on the progress of two extensions they previously profiled: .WED and .XYZ.
Adrienne McAdory from .WED was asked for an update on how things were going, and she responded with: “Slow, very, very slow, we haven’t had traction yet. But you know, I say it’s like a tree in the forest. People don’t know about it yet. So I’m on a five-year plan, small business, getting it out there.”
NPR: “And how many people have actually signed up so far?“
McAdory: “Oh, gosh, between the ones that we have given away and people have signed up, I can’t really tell you. I think it’s something over – maybe approaching 100.”
NPR: “So you’re not close to breaking even?”
McAdory: “No, God no.”
NPR then switched over to .XYZ and Daniel Negari (also recently discussed by Shane here), highlighted their 700,000+ registrations, and mentioned their deal with Network Solutions, without specifically naming them:
NPR: “Part of what happened is that this big company that actually handles the sale of websites bought up a bunch of .XYZs for its customers – said, you know, you got, whatever, robertspizza.com, now you also got robertspizza.xyz for a year. Try it out.”
Negari: “That was a multimillion-dollar deal that really funded a lot of the growth that we’ve had.“
Then, NPR referenced their perceived lack of real companies using the new G’s, “I feel like I’ve seen ads all over the place, especially here in New York City, for .NYC, that everyone’s trying to sell these new endings. But I have yet to meet anyone – go into a business anywhere where someone is giving me anything other than a .COM or .ORG.“
Finally, sadly, they confused domain investors with squatters, “Yeah, and you know – and frankly, a lot of these websites, or some fraction of them, are squatters. Basically, people who’ve bought up robert.xyz and…” “…Not developed it, but said, hey, if you want it, I’ll sell it to you for more.”
You can listen to the whole segment via the audio embedded below (start at about the 3:25 mark), or you can read the entire transcript here.
I fail to see the void .xyz fills that cannot be filled by .net/.info/.biz/.us which have slowing growth, and continued registration drops, but have some sort of significance in terms of a defining extension?
I also do not understand why network solutions would spend millions of dollars to put these names into accounts for free, I got one, auto renew is off on it, I spent some time on how to delete it, I couldn’t see a button so I will let it drop.
Fabulous journalism NPR.
So it was a multi-million dollar deal that funded their growth ?
WTF . Which moron at web.com approved spending millions on free .xyz domains for their customers ?
Dear web.com (WWWW) investors. . . . are you paying attention ?
xyz should have paid you to give away their domains not the other way around
The best hope for .WED is as a typo for .WEB .