BELLEVUE, Wash. – Donuts Inc., the world’s largest registry for new generic top-level domains (gTLDs), announced in a press release that it has registered its one millionth Internet address, making the company the first new gTLD provider to reach that total.
Heavenly.COFFEE became the one millionth address registered across all Donuts gTLDs. The milestone registration comes less than ten full months after Donuts opened its first new gTLDs for general registration in January. The brisk pace of registrations reflects not just interest in and usage of Donuts gTLDs, which has been substantial, but in the new gTLD program as a whole, which now tallies almost 2.7 million registrations globally. More than 1,000 registrations in Donuts gTLDs are ranked in Alexa’s top one million most visited sites.
“It’s exciting to reach such a major landmark so soon, but what’s even better is what those million addresses represent,” Donuts co-founder and CEO Paul Stahura said. “Each one of those names represents countless opportunities for engagement, outreach and branding in a digital world free from artificial scarcity. With new gTLDs, users choose the names that are meaningful to them, their audiences and their customers, rather than picking from a short list of virtually meaningless options.”
The widespread adoption of new gTLDs has come during what are still the early phases of the global new gTLD program. Many of the most popular pre-launch gTLDs continue to work through the contention resolution process established by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the domain name industry’s technical coordinator. And growth is still in its infant stages—a recent forecast by the investment banking firm B. Riley & Co. projected that new gTLD registrations could top 20 million by 2016, accounting for 15 percent of the worldwide market.
“This is a real achievement not only for Donuts, but for the new gTLD program,” said Chris Pacitti, a general partner at venture capital firm Austin Ventures, an early investor in Donuts. “The Donuts team is well out in front of the market, which has been starving for valid Internet identities for years now. We expect significant growth to continue.”
“As rewarding as the past ten months have been, the best days of the new gTLD program remain ahead,” Stahura said. “Internet users have had only a taste of the full range of choices that will be available within the next year.”
Donuts securely operates the largest number of the Internet’s top-level domain names and provides varied and relevant online identities, in multiple languages and character sets, to businesses, individuals, and organizations worldwide. Donuts is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington, with offices in Southern California, Washington, D.C. and London. For more information, please visit www.donuts.co.