.alum
Is .alum a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
.alum is not contested. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list, as of 7 October 2026. It is Kingfish.
A niche string for alumni groups and campaigns; most schools will keep alumni sites under their own domains, so demand stays thin.
alumni associations, university advancement offices, alumni-network startups and reunion or giving campaigns that want a short memorable address outside the institution's main domain
The 2012 applications making the most similar bet. Chosen by AI from every string in that round, without being told what happened to any of them.
Same bet as .alum: a short academic-status word sold as a wearable badge to people whose eligibility was conferred by a school, with the institutions themselves as the other natural buyer — identity-by-credential rather than a category or a brand.
Also an academic-standing shorthand whose value rests on individuals wanting their school-granted status as their primary address, so it lives or dies on the same question as .alum: will people pay to display an affiliation rather than a business category.
Matches the word-type and the job — a clipped, colloquial self-label for a group that owns no registry and has no single gatekeeper — but the buyer is a diaspora community rather than institutions and their graduates, so the demand side is a different animal.
What a .alum domain is
.alum is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, filed under Culture. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list.
Is the .alum domain extension real yet?
.alum is not yet a domain extension you can register: nothing resolves under it, and no registrar sells names in it. It is a string applicants have put forward in the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, the process that decides whether it becomes one.
When can you buy a .alum domain?
You can’t yet. ICANN publishes every applied-for string on Reveal Day, 7 October 2026 at 18:00 UTC. A .alum name can only be registered after that, once the string is delegated and its registry opens. Last round's closest parallel to .alum was .mba, delegated on 22 May 2015.
Is .alum a real TLD?
Not yet. .alum is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because .alum is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list of applied-for strings. Every entry on this page links to its source.
- Kingfish · first recordedICANN
- Band chosen: 10-29 (vanity/narrow). The string reads naturally as 'alumni' in English, with a secondary chemical/aluminium meaning that is too narrow to drive registrations. The constituency that would plausibly use it (alumni associations, advancement offices, alumni networks) is real but institutionally conservative: alumni sites overwhelmingly live as subdomains or sections of the parent institution's existing domain, which carries the trust that an alumni audience expects, so a serious primary identity on .alum needs explaining and would mostly appear as campaign or redirect use. By analogy (flagged as analogy), education-adjacent new gTLDs from the earlier round such as .education, .academy and .university found modest, defensive or price-driven registration bases rather than category-standard status, and .alum is narrower than any of them. It is not in the 30-49 band because there is no obvious volume or price-driven registration engine and no institution segment likely to adopt it as a default; it is not in the 1-9 band because a defined buyer group with recurring campaign needs (reunions, giving days, alumni networks) exists. Main market uncertainty: whether a meaningful number of institutions or alumni-network products would treat 'name.alum' as a credible identity rather than a redirect, or whether individuals would adopt it as a personal 'I am an alum of X' identity, which would change the demand shape. Applicant facts from the record: one confirmed application, by Sockeye LLC, with no contention recorded; this says nothing about demand for the string.