Stuart Fuller on Dot London's Anniversary

The city of London celebrated the first birthday of its digital offspring, the dotLondon domain, this May. Since London and Partners launched the new Top Level Domain (TLD) there have been over 60,000 registrations, making it the 13th most popular new generic TLD.

Whilst London lags behind some of its global counterparts - dotBerlin (156,000 registrations so far) and dotNYC (74,000 registrations) - there can be no doubt the first year has been a success. Where the TLD has done well is grabbing the headlines, not only in the technology press, but also in more mainstream media.

High profile pioneers

dotLondon has certainly benefited from having some high-profile London brands as their pioneers, although the registry will probably be disappointed that more big London-based brands have not yet engaged with the new domain ending. Premier League football team West Ham United, Fortnum & Mason and the iconic evening newspaper the London Evening Standard were three of the original trailblazers who are still promoting the gTLD, whilst Greenwich-based brewery Meantime is using it as the cornerstone of its "Londoner" media campaign.

The success of any new gTLD will be measured on usage and renewal rates. Currently, according to stats provided by www.nTLDStats.com, over 60 per cent of dotLondon registrations do not currently direct to an active webpage and are being parked for future use. It will be these names that will prove key to the renewal numbers. However, the TLD is still growing by around 3.5 per cent per month, which is impressive.

dotLondon’s competition

dotLondon can certainly claim to be one of the most popular city-specific gTLDs. It is well documented that dotBerlin’s numbers were boosted in the first few weeks by marketing promotions, which may have a major impact on renewal numbers when they start to kick in during the next few months. We have already seen a net reduction in the number of domains under management by a few thousand in the past few weeks.

DotNYC continues to grow, even with restrictions on registrants having to be located within the five boroughs of New York City. Behind dotLondon, Tokyo (26th), Cologne (36th), Moscow (43rd and its Cyrillic character variation in 46th) and Paris (50th) all sit in the top 50, unlikely to challenge dotLondon’s position.

In April, ICM, the registry behind dotAdult and dotPorn announced that they believe their sunrise may have eclipsed that of dotLondon to become the most successful of the new gTLD programme to date. Even so, it was an impressive campaign from London and Partners, underlining both the attractiveness of the Top Level Domain and the desire to associate with one of the most popular cities in the world.

As web users become more familiarised with the new gTLDs and London’s brand continuesto grow in power and influence, dotLondon is destined to become one of the most successful web address endings of the future.