Domains such as “.fun” are on the rise during the pandemic, according to data from HostGator, a multinational website hosting company
New and curious possibilities of domain extensions have been highlighted in the web address market. At the multinational hosting site and services for online presence HostGator, domains .fun, for example, recorded an increase of almost eleven thousand percent this year compared to 2020. And that's just partial data for 2021, that is, calculated up to June. The options are noteworthy because they are varied and relate to the area of activity of the owners of the site, such as terminations .tech, which may indicate a business in the technology field.
The extensions, also known as TLDs, from the English Top-Level Domain, or top-level domain, accompany the website name to compose the internet address. Like the name, TDLs can be chosen at the time of the domain register.
More than 1,200 new generic TLDs (known as gTLDs) have been created since 2012, at the initiative of ICANN, the entity responsible for the Domain Name System at the global level. The category represented 6.3% of total TLD registrations through the first quarter of 2021, according to the Verisign survey, with the main ones being: .X Y Z (13.3%), .online (7.8%) and .top (5.3%), followed by .site, .club, .vip, .icu, .shop, .app and .work.
According to Ricardo Melo, marketing manager at HostGator, the new domain extensions have become popular because it is more difficult for organizations to get an original address with the traditional ones .with and .with.br. “We saw the trend in the market when sales of newer and 'unusual' domain extensions started to grow, while the usual ones started to decline. This is because there are not so many options available anymore, and the brands take advantage of the situation to innovate in some way”, illustrates Melo.
The search for different extensions also seems to follow market trends. An example is the .live, which grew over 200% from 2019 to 2020 with the boom in lives at the start of the pandemic.
For Melo, a brand can stand out for the creativity in the website address. “It is possible to use TLDs related to your business, which already indicate to the user what services, products or objectives of your company are”, he adds. According to domain registrar Radix, the extension .fun, launched in 2017 for the entertainment and leisure sectors, helps to create a young, vibrant and flexible brand image.
the numbers of .fun and .live they're not the only ones that get attention. the extension .space, focused on creative spaces, saw an increase of more than 1330% in HostGator sales from 2020 to 2021. According to Radix, TLD is in around 314,000 domain names and nearly 90,000 active sites in 220 countries.
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