[ADVERTISEMENT] Hidden Deals and up to 70% Discounts on 600 Million Products!
PALM BEACH, FL – “.NYC”, it’s called “The Official Web Address for New Yorkers”, and a top level domain name which is restricted to being registered only by “lawful” residents and/or businesses within the New York City area (the five boroughs).
The slogan of being the “Official” web address of the City its named after isn’t just fluff marketing material either; it actually is, The Official URL, according to NYC.gov.
The legal entity-registry is recorded as “The City of New York” by and through the New York City Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) with its back-end services provided by Sterling, Virginia based NeuStar, Inc., which was purchased in 2017 for $2.9 billion by Golden Gate Capital.
According to DomainInvesting.com, the registry recently held an awards ceremony for its 2019 “Best of Boroughs” Awards to honor five outstanding organizations that use a “.NYC” domain name; one in each borough of New York City. A $5,000 prize was awarded to each winner. The contest stuck out to me as being from Long Island, I remember hearing about the “Best of the Boro” awards which is attributed to Queens, NYC businesses by Schneps Media; the two probably get confused some.
The launch and availability of the “.NYC” domain name was a long time coming and was originally envisioned by an East Village, NYC tech entrepreneur named Paul Garrin of name.space who said he operated “.NYC” and over 480 other alternative dots on “an alternate D.N.S. root zone system” since 1996.
Paul seems to be a very interesting and creative person, like most domainers are. He is an artist, and when once asked how exactly art blended with technology Paul said:
Control media and you control the public. Free media is a threat to control. As an artist, one strives to discover an effective means of working in any medium—and when that medium is a mass medium, the key is to establish and sustain visibility. If there is no support system to guarantee reliable distribution, the work disappears.
Here is a video of Garrin discussing the root zone system; unfortunately, it cuts off before the end. The video is undated, but it seems old. He discusses IPV 6 being recently rolled-out which starting making the rounds near Windows XP time (2001).
“.NYC” received its first genuine interest from the New York City government community in 2001 and its application, approval, delegation and roll-out spanned the administration of three different New York City mayors including Rudy Giuliani, Michael Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio. It also had early support from past New York City mayors such as Ed Koch saying “DotNYC is the best real estate opportunity since the Dutch bought Manhattan.”
Koch actually misstates their promotional URL in the commercial verbalizing the actual address for www.dotnyc.net as “please go to www-dot-nyc-dot-net” at the end, which is incorrect to what is shown on the screen. What a dot-anything-but-dot-com disaster. That’s a tong twister.
So where is “.NYC” today?
A little more than five years after “.NYC” hit its “landrush” registration phase on October 8, 2014, nTLDStats.com shows it at about 68,500 domains registered (approximately 66,000 are in the zone file and 42,000 are parked).
This is about 10,000 less names than it had about 2 years after its release in 2016 when its lackluster results were covered by the Wall Street Journal (due to subscription, referenced by 6sqft.com).
New Yorkers are called a lot of things, such as “Not Friendly Enough”, “Ignorant and Stressed Out”, or “Rude, Bitter and Disgruntled” but for the most part, they’re not called Stupid. Those registration numbers are not going to account for a whole lot of revenue, especially when the City of New York is only getting 40 percent of total revenues generated from registrations – which is exactly why NYC government, under the arrangement with Neustar, made sure it was guaranteed at least $3.6 million in revenue for the first five years when it made the agreement.
About The Author: John Colascione is Chief Executive Officer of Internet Marketing Services Inc. He specializes in Website Monetization, is a Google AdWords Certified Professional, authored a ‘how to’ book called ”Mastering Your Website‘, and is a key player in several Internet related businesses through his search engine strategy brand Searchen Networks®
I just looked at the cheapest renewal: $22 the multiplied by 78,000 (about the avg. # of domains over the course of 5 years). That’s 78,000 names existing every yr for 5 yrs. $22 x 78k = $1,716,000 per yr. renewal fees x 5 years = about $8.5 million in gross revenue since inception.
Sounds like they are under water. Based on those numbers, they collected 8.58 million, of which, 40% to the city would have been $3.43 million – but NYC instead received their guaranteed 18 million. If they keep it up, the city will only be collecting 40% of $1,716,000 a year, under $700k a year; I wonder what it will cost (per year) a bunch of state/civil service workers to keep track of the administration and records on their end of the program?
Govt. terrible at making money – this one might never be profitable.
All the new tld geos that I have seen are in the same boat, falling registrations, very little usage and loss making.
I wonder if some will get shut done eventually or if the gov will run it at as loss as a service.
There are 3 or 4 idiots running around Twitter and the blogs pumping .nyc all day every day.
They have more posts on Twitter and comments on blogs than .nyc has domains registered. lol
They will show up on this thread with comments, arguments, and outright lies.
That’s all they do.
That’s all they got.
Definition of a loser!
Just another worthless GTLD that’s going nowhere.
John, usage is up. I post a fraction of the photos I take of .NYC in use. Declines were natural from overzealous investors who didn’t have a solid plan. End users will determine the success of any gTLD not investors.
Snoopy – don’t you get tired of the saying the same old stuff? Ok you don’t like new Gs… Wonderful. Anything else to say?
Rick – “they will show up on this thread”, erm, well I have the experience in .nyc, not you so I can probably talk a little more than you can about it. But I know you’re fearful of discussing this based on facts. You’re such a domainer snowflake!