TLD industry predictions 2015 on Domain Name Wire

Domain Name Wire did a special on TLD industry predictions for 2015 which features Escrow.com, Rightside, Donuts, Sedo, DirectNic, .Club, dotTBA and InternetX and ParkLogic.  You can find it here.

As listed, my TLD industry predictions 2015 are as follows:

1. The new gTLD program will have between 7 and 8 million registrations at the end of June.
2. Actual third-party arm’s length registrations will have a renewal rate of 65%
3. ICANN will still be sitting on tens of millions of dollars of auctions funds without benefiting the industry or contributors
4. Publicly listed companies will continue to try to gain traction but will have difficulty overcoming the stigma of the dot com bubble along with the lack of real long-term revenues from operations and no one time cash injections from losing potential assets in auction
5. New gTLDs will start to gain transaction in 2015 but will still have a lot of in 2016.
6. First rumblings of new gTLDs failing/consolidation will occur.
7. Premium market will continue to grow in both volume and value of sales
8. We have another year of enduring the pain of reading posts stating that ‘all new gtlds are dumb and will fail”.

At the end of the year, we will score our TLD industry predictions 2015 and see how we did!