Summer is heating up, and everyone is heading out to the .club — are you in the .club?

Everyone is talking about the new gTLD .club, which surpassed .guru this week as the most popular new gTLD in the world. It now has the most domain name registrations of all new gTLDs with more than 60,000 registrations. Marketing of the new gTLD has been impeccable; .club hosted a launch party in New York City last week featuring 50 Cent — maximizing the hype and providing a clear example of how important it is for trademark owners to be proactive in monitoring new gTLDs.

It’s too early to know why some gTLDs are more popular than others, but success may be attributed to the consumer base and market sectors to which they appeal. New gTLDs have several categories: generic industry terms, geographical terms, niche terms and brand terms. The generic mainstream terms such as .blog appeal to consumers because they hold a broad meaning extending across varying jurisdictions. Niche gTLDs on the other hand, appeal to a small segment of the market, such as .luxury, which has nearly 900 registrations. The .club gTLD may be getting so much play because its operating in both markets — mainstream and niche gTLDs, increasing its appeal.

The .club and .guru gTLDs have taken early leads in registration, but registration is likely to slow down as other new, exciting and highly generic gTLDs get set to enter sunrise periods. With new gTLDs continually launching, and others in various stages of rollout, it’s more important than ever to keep up.

Newly delegated gTLDs

ICANN has not slowed in announcing new gTLDs. Nine have been delegated since our last blog post (read the full list of delegated gTLDs). The newest gTLDs include:

• .商标 – Chinese for “trademark”
• .motorcycles
• .reise
• .versicherung
• .autos
• .homes
• .rio
• .yachts
• . موقع — Arabic for “site”

The sun never gets tired of rising

The sun shines on these new gTLDs beginning their mandated sunrise periods (read the full list of gTLDS in Sunrise).

If any of these gTLDs could be of value to you or your brand, or are of concern — remember that, as a registered agent of ICANN’s Trademark Clearinghouse, we can help develop and implement your gTLD strategy. For more information, read Porter Wright’s law alert about gTLDs.