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A Guide to Using a WHOIS Database Download for New gTLD Searches

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With about 1,500 top-level domains (TLDs), domain name investors have many TLDs to choose from. Aside from the staples (e.g., .com, .net, .org, and other original TLDs), how can you possibly pick out which one is a profitable addition to your domain portfolio?

One way would be to see domain registration trends for specific generic TLDs (gTLDs) that could provide insights on how they are gaining traction in the market. For instance, detecting increases in new domain registrations could hint at the level of demand for a specific gTLD. Such data can be gleaned from a WHOIS database download.

Gaining Insights on Recent Domain Registrations Under Specific gTLDs

To illustrate how WHOIS Database Download can give an idea about domain registration trends, let us look into five new gTLDs—.academy, .center, .church, .college, and .delivery—through the Domain Research Suite (DRS). These gTLDs tend to serve sectors that may have been forced to transition most of their operations online due to the pandemic. The goal is to answer these questions:
  • How many domains were created for each gTLD in the past six months?
  • Is there a significant trend that hints at the lucrativeness of the gTLDs?
  • How different is the domain registration for each gTLD compared to the same period in the previous year?
Domains Created for Each gTLD in the Past 6 Months
There is a fluctuating but noticeable increase in the number of domains registered from August 2020 to January 2021 for .academy and .church. Domain registrations for .center and .delivery, meanwhile, increased until December 2020 but decreased slightly in January 2021. However, the domain registration for .college started dwindling after November 2020.

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Among the five gTLDs we explored, .academy has the most number of new domains, followed by .center.

Domain Registration Comparison before and during the Coronavirus Pandemic
While the numbers in the table above tell us that there are slight month-on-month increases for some of the gTLDs, it might be interesting to see how they compare with the same period the previous year or before the coronavirus pandemic hit.

Apart from the .center gTLD, all of the gTLDs explored in this post experienced a spike in domain registration when data from August 2019 to January 2020 and August 2020 to January 2021 were compared.

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Based on this information, domain investors could do more studies on .academy, .college, and .delivery to see how they can enrich their portfolios. The .delivery gTLD showed the highest rise in domain registration, at 110%, while .academy and .college saw increases of 50% and 89%, respectively.

To put things into perspective, two other new gTLDs pertaining to sectors that might have also been affected by the pandemic—.marketing and .gallery—were explored. The domain registrations for these gTLDs rose by 17% and 29%, respectively. However, these increases are still unlike the levels experienced by .academy, .college, and .delivery.

How to Use Reverse WHOIS Search to Investigate New gTLDs

These are the steps we followed to arrive at the data presented above:

1. Under Reverse WHOIS Search of the DRS, go to the Advanced search tab and select In specific WHOIS fields.
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2. Under the Search term(s) parameter, select Domain Name and Ends with, then type in the gTLD of your choice.

3. Under the Search through domains parameter, select Current.
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4. Set the date filters to limit the number of results. In our illustration, we used the Created From and Created To filters to obtain the domains registered within a specific month or period. For example, we typed 1 August 2020 in the Created From field and 31 August 2020 in the Created To field to get a list of domains under the .delivery gTLD registered within August 2020.
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Based on the parameters we specified for this illustration, we got a list of 359 .delivery domains registered within August 2020.
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Like any other type of investment, choosing domain names requires making data-backed decisions. Studying and detecting registration trends with the help of tools like a WHOIS database are among the practices that can help make domain portfolio decisions.

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