It started with a dream of bringing a fresh new domain ending to the internet, and five years ago that dream became a reality. We successfully launched .xyz and now .xyz is the most popular new domain in the world!

My mission has always been to bring competition and choice to the marketplace, which has been saturated by .com domains since the early days of the internet. We are still in the early days as a new domain operator, but the journey has been extremely rewarding and we now have a dozen new domain endings.

I have always been a data driven guy. My decision to bring a hip new ending to the marketplace was driven by the large demand and appetite for domain names. When researching user behavior years ago, I noticed that people were often selecting their 5th, 6th, and 10th .com choice. I knew the demand for a new alternative domain ending was there, so why not end a domain with .xyz? It’s the perfect way to end your search for a domain name. XYZ is globally recognizable as the last three letters of the alphabet and infinitely memorable.

My thesis ended up being true. Today .xyz is the most popular new domain with a lot of usage, and a lot more growth and usage to come. I want to remind my readers that .com had a 30 year head start and completely saturated the markets. When I came online in the 90’s I knew the internet as AOL. Many people today know the internet as Facebook. In between those gaps in time people knew the internet as .com. I see that the pendulum is now swinging back to domain names, and we intend to continue to be in the forefront of small businesses and individuals seeking an online presence.

https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/xyz-2014-06-19-en

190,989.00

The February 2014 Transaction report shows the dns-udp-queries-received for .xyz was only 190,989. This is indicative of DNS queries made for .xyz domains before we launched in June 2014.

28,265,354,505.00

In January 2019 we had over 28 Billion queries. This is the most among all the new gTLDs. From my research this number of monthly queries has trended very nicely over time. Below is a chart of annualized numbers:

date dns-udp-queries-received
Jan-2019 28,265,354,505.00
Jan-2018 14,140,516,721.00
Jan-2017 21,222,439,798.00
Jan-2016 17,723,810,880.00
Jan-2015 2,500,097,019.00
Feb-2014 190,989.00

As a comparable, .org, which is one of the most successful and well respected domain endings out there received 198 Billion requests in January 2019 on about 10,000,000 domains in their zone file. When we compare that number to 28 Billion requests in January 2019 for .xyz on about 2,000,000 domains, this is extremely promising. For a business that has been around for only 5 years, I believe these results are truly fantastic. I am a big believer in the saying that “a rising tide raises all ships”.

We @XYZ are heavily focused on continuing to make .xyz domains available through our vast distribution channel to end users around the globe at an affordable price. You may have noticed that other new domain registries seem to be raising their prices, and we have stayed the same. Although we are definitely feeling the impact of inflation, my goal is to continue to increase our penetration around the world and be the go-to ending for businesses and individuals today.

Competition, check.

While we have 2,000,000 domains registered, it is tough to comprehend that there are 141,000,000 .com’s currently registered. So new users can keep mining through .com to see if they can find something they like or they can choose a shorter more memorable .xyz for $1 first yr and ~$10 renewals.

Choice, check.

There are even more naming options coming your way soon, which I believe will only increase momentum for .xyz domain names. Google is launching their portfolio of domain endings, and so is Amazon. These are big time companies with major marketing reach. As I mentioned earlier, the pendulum is swinging, and it is swinging towards domain names as your online identity. We are very well positioned to be the go to domain ending and the value users get by picking up a short easy to remember .xyz for $1 goes a long way – especially in non US markets where the savings can be invested in building a business.

Our long term goals have only grown @XYZ. I fully intend to dominate worldwide markets one registrant at a time. I am extremely passionate about .xyz and what we have built as a team to date. We have a solid platform and the future is directly ahead of us. Many smaller registrars tell us we are their #1 to #3 top selling domain name monthly, even more than the local country code and .com at times. So the writing is on the wall. We have our heads down here ensuring our domains are available at a reasonable cost for people to innovate.

This process takes time, but we are progressing. As a registry we have a solid base of renewals, and earn good cash flow from our business as a whole. This gives us the holding power to continue to invest in customer acquisition, marketing and awareness.

Thank you to the entire XYZ community for believing in us to date, and thank you for your continued support moving forward. We look forward to not only being the most popular new domain ending in the world, but the most popular domain – period.

Boom!

Daniel