Welcome to .Cloud, population 70,000 and growing
By Mou Mukherjee, Director of Marketing
It’s been 7 months since our general availability launch in February. With over 70,000 domain names registered, .cloud proves to be one of the most interesting new domain extensions on the market.
Beyond the numbers, we are pleased to see many happy customers enjoying their new .cloud. Day after day we have been discovering all the creative ways .cloud has been put to use.
Our dream for .cloud was for it to be open to creative interpretation and to serve a broader audience. It’s great to see that confirmed by a customer base that goes well beyond the cloud computing industry.
Our pioneers pave the way
Our .cloud journey starts last year with our pioneer program which attracts a wide variety of companies from across the globe. Our pioneers get their names pre-launch and the first .cloud domains go live in early October. Here’s just a few pioneer stories that unfold as we lead up to our general availability launch:
In November 2015 we head to New York for the The Next Web Conference with our Registrar partner Name.com, to spread the word about the upcoming availability of the .cloud extension. Our Pioneer stories are well received and become instrumental in helping us raise awareness leading up to our launch.
Getting off the ground with general availability
On February 15th, the day before our launch,
Domain Name Wire writes that .cloud is one of the most anticipated new domain names to come on the market. The next day the story is picked up by tech powerhouse publications including
Venturebeat,
The Verge, and
Gizmodo! Elsewhere in the world our launch is covered by
V3,
the Inquirer,
techradar,
t3n and many other leading European publications.
In just 24 hours .cloud sails past
20,000 registrations. In fact, registrations came pouring in all week. By the end of the week we reach
30,000 registrations.
We have one of the most successful new domain launch weeks to date, and we owe much of this result to the support of our pioneers, registrars, partners and advocates. The launch was just the beginning and we know that sustaining momentum over the following months will be crucial.
Reaching 50,000 registrations
In March we head to WorldHostingDays with our Registrar partner
OpenSRS. In April we are delighted by two big .cloud launches:
- Samsung launches Artik.cloud, a new Cloud Platform for connected devices, at their developer conference in San Francisco
- Ingram Micro launches ahead.cloud, a cloud news site to support a new partner content marketing initiative
By May, just short of 3 months since our launch, we reach 50,000 domains with registrations in over 130 countries and release this
celebratory infographic. In June we hit the road again and travel to Seattle for DockerCon. With with our Registrar partner 1&1 we raise awareness about why .cloud is the most
relevant domain for cloud professionals.
Beyond the cloud industry
As of September 19, 2016, 70,450 domains have been registered by businesses and individuals in 143 countries. Beyond the cloud industry, it has attracted interest from a broad audience, including startups, creative professionals, online retailers, and bloggers.
There’s also growing examples from many different industries such as retail & ecommerce, finance, travel, entertainment, education, and local business.
Here’s a few examples:
- Teeshirt.cloud - online t-shirt retailer based in Los Angeles
- Invoice.cloud - German based invoice processing transformed in the digital age
- Travel.cloud - UK based travel platform designed for the internet century
- United.cloud - TV service platform of the future
- Sagemath.cloud - online platform for SageMath, an open-source mathematics software system
- Massage.cloud - network of mobile in home massage therapy in Scottsdale and surrounding areas
.Cloud has also attracted registrars and resellers worldwide with 76 of them offering .cloud. Top registrars include GoDaddy, Tucows, and Name.com. And with website builders such as Squarespace now offering .cloud, we look forward to many more creative examples.
What’s next
To build even more awareness for .cloud with the broader audience, at the end of September we are going mass and partnering with
GoDaddy! That’s right, we’ve got a
TV commercial set to hit the CNN airwaves in USA and Asia.
In October it will be one year since the very first .cloud sites went live. We’ll check in with our pioneers and see how their experience has been with .cloud, and we look forward to sharing their updates on our blog. We are also working on some in-depth case-studies. If you know someone that has an interesting story about using .cloud, please get in touch with us.