As we discussed before, .xyz is in the top position amongst new gTLDs in the number of registrations so far but a high percent of these registrations came from free .xyz domains added to someone owning a matching .com (.net, .org, .info, etc) domains. I got mine, too, a really worthless and unwanted domain, medpathways.xyz. Of course, I got the usual automatic emails that this is the last chance to renew it or I will lose the domain forever but I felt that I can live with this loss.
At the same time, huge promotion started at Namecheap, offering .xyz domains for $1. The results of the promotion is clear, number of daily nTLD registrations jumped from 100 to 2000.
New gTLD registrations at Namecheap has been take off recently (source)
It is really interesting anyway, how much a price decrease from yearly $10 to $1 influenced the number of registrations, so this should be really considered when a decision is made about registration fees. E.g. .expert and .recipes would be way more popular with a more friendly fees as they cost $55 a year.
So this is what I thought that .xyz will try to compensate the loss of the hundreds of thousands of unwanted free .xyz domains with $1 domain to try to keep their not that much real first position. The change from free to $1 domains would also result in increased quality of the registered domains. However, it seems I am not right. I’ve just checked the whois of “my” medpathways.xyz and to my greatest surprise, its expiration date is extended with another year. Since it shows expired status in my Network Solutions account, I don’t know what will happen with this “hidden gem” in the next year. But one can conclude that the ratio of the expired .xyz can be that much which cannot be unbalanced with $1 promotion and a drop rate of maybe even 80% would have a devastating effect on .xyz.
Thus, it seems that we will not see any drops this year for .xyz and the self-financed success story can continue (again, I like .xyz anyway) and with the $1 promotion the numbers will look even better.
