.club

.club is one of the most popular and the most selling new gTLD. .Club Domains LLC was founded specifically for this single domain extension in 2012. Their motto could be quality over quantity, since .club domain alone is responsible for most of the high nTLD sales, cumulative sales are over $1,000,000 in its first year. Besides the marketing efforts, there are several reasons, why .club is such a successful extension so far:

  • General usage. Clubs, work and hobby groups, passions, cities, sport teams, etc: all of them are ready to use the term “club”.
  • Early start. It was one of the first new TLD, when the interest was really high to catch some good, meaningful domain that turns into gold later.
  • Good pricing, not too expensive, not too cheap. With a price about $20, it is not much more expensive than a .com, so there is no high barrier to register and renew .club domains.

The highest .club sales are all one word domains, mostly in the topics of food (eat.club), drink (wine.club), nations (english.club, chinese.club, russia.club) and general words related to club (meet.club, fan.club, joy.club). All of these domains were sold for 5-6 figures and their renewal fee can be also higher than regular .club domains.

There is another ranking method, where .club is the amongst the best new gTLDs. On the Alexa rank top 1 million list, .club is the second most frequent nTLD (455 in the top 1 million at the time of writing, 40 in top 100k), suggesting that not only speculators and cyber squatters but real end users are using the domain. The registry does not let .club domains to simply expire but all expired .club domains are auctioned exclusively by Snapnames.

In summary, .club is one of the most popular new extension, boosted by its brandability and pricing.