Automattic, the company behind WordPress has Won the TLD. The .blog Domain Will Be Available By November 2016 and Can not Be Reserved Now. Matt Mullenweg, the founder of the company, recently revealed some background to the transaction, including some about the private auction held in February 2015. Matt Mullenweg is quite known for tricky domain hack, which includes his own domain name ma.tt.
.blog Domain Will Be Available By November 2016 and Can Not Be Reserved Now
.blog domain can not be reserved at this moment. You can directly point towards this URL :
1 | https://dotblog.wordpress.com/thankyou/ |
That is the confirmation webpage after showing interest to .blog from this webpage – nic.blog‘s buy a .blog button, followed by confirmation. It is clearly written –
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.blog domains cannot be reserved or claimed just yet, but we’ll keep you posted so you can be first in line when they become available.
Unless WordPress or Matt or Automattic gives white signal, you possibly should not pre-register via the current domain resellers.
.blog Domain Will Be Available By November 2016 : What is the Plan For the gTLD?
If Automattic had not took it, some specialized companies, probably the other competitors would have made the future difficult for the users – especially Google, the direct competitors of WordPress with the proprietary Blogger platform. In view of the above and with great relief of competition, the .blog registry seems not willing to make a gTLD exclusive to the WordPress ecosystem. From the official page of WHOIS of that company through whom Automattic won it, there is written that the gTLD will be available for everyone. The general availability of .blog has not yet been clearly announced but Automattic plans to give at least 250,000 domains by the end of 2016. They have unveiled a timeline for the process. The technical work behind making a domain available to point via DNS is difficult and sucks huge server resources.
Domain registration prices are still being finalized, but Automattic promised that pricing will be in the standard range for new top-level domains with some premium pricing for higher-value names. The domain names will become available through traditional timeframes such as “sunrise” (only the trademark owners can purchase the domain names) and “land rush” (time when applications can be received prior to general availability).
