New York City is on the fast track to becoming the dot-com capital of the world.
The rush to grab the city’s digital real estate — or addresses ending in .nyc — has made the Big Apple’s six-month-old domain the fastest-growing among a host of cities granted approval for their own top-level domains.
“We are growing at a faster clip than any other geo-locale,” said Lori Anne Wardi, vice president of registry at Neustar, which operates the .nyc exchange for the city.
“New York City is the center of the business, financial, media and fashion worlds, so I am not too surprised,” she added.
People had registered 73,721 .nyc addresses as of Thursday, or an average of 12,287 a month since the domain debuted in mid-October, according to Softnik Technologies’ Domain Punch.
New York City’s domain exchange has registered more addresses than that of London (58,366), Tokyo (35,271), Paris (16,256) or Las Vegas (13,854), Domain Punch’s data show.
And the number of people buying .nyc domain names is expected to rise significantly.
“We are in the early phase of awareness building,” Wardi said.
New York City is growing faster than its geo-peers in part because government has been promoting it. Private entities own some other city sites.
Berlin, which launched its domain a year ago, is tops in terms of total Web addresses, with 153,440 since its launch in March 2014. But excluding around 72,000 .berlin domain names it got in a big boost from a two-day, free domain-name giveaway, the German capital has registered an average of 6,768 a month, roughly half New York’s growth rate.
“We are now growing at a faster pace than Berlin, but it’s comparing apples and oranges because Berlin was offering free names,” Wardi said.
The cost to buy a .nyc domain name typically ranges from $25 to $40 a year. The city officially launched .nyc in the fall, allowing people and organizations with a physical address in the five boroughs to purchase them.
In May, the domain had a “soft” launch, when a limited number of registered trademark holders — mostly businesses — could apply for an address. The domain allows people to capitalize on their Big Apple association while also opening up names and terms that are no longer available as .com domains.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers issues licenses for new domains. Last year, it expanded the number of top-level domains from 22 to more than 1,000, saying it needed to accommodate the Net’s explosion.