.anime
Is .anime a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
.anime is not contested. One applicant has said publicly that it applied to run it, and nobody else has, as of 16 August 2026. It is Oinkadot.
A natural home for anime fan sites, communities, and creators, but most anime businesses will likely keep mainstream domains.
anime fans, fan-community builders, indie creators, fan-art and episode-guide sites, and merch sellers targeting the anime audience; secondarily studios and streaming brands registering defensively.
One of 25 strings the Oinkadot partnership (Ray King of Porkbun and Todd Han of Dynadot) applied for in the ICANN 2026 round, per Domain Name Wire's exclusive.
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 almost exactly: an insider word from the anime/otaku fandom's own vocabulary, sold as a badge of belonging to a self-identifying subculture rather than as an industry directory, so it only works if fans put their personal and community identity on it.
A genre-cum-culture noun owned by a scene rather than any company, betting that artists, fans and media outlets will all treat the string as an identity claim to a movement — the same dispersed, culture-first buyer profile as .anime.
Same shape of bet — an unownable creative-medium category noun that creators, distributors and fans could all plausibly claim — but pitched a full level broader (a whole art form, and a far more industry/rights-holder-contested one) than a single fandom-bounded genre.
What a .anime domain is
.anime is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, filed under Culture. One applicant has said publicly that it applied for .anime.
Is the .anime domain extension real yet?
.anime 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 .anime domain?
You can’t yet. ICANN publishes every applied-for string on Reveal Day, 7 October 2026 at 18:00 UTC. A .anime name can only be registered after that, once the string is delegated and its registry opens. Last round's closest parallel to .anime was .moe, delegated on .
Is .anime a real TLD?
Not yet. .anime is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because an applicant said publicly that it applied for .anime in the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round. Every claim on this page links to its source.
- Oinkadot · first recordedDomain Name Wire (Andrew Allemann)
“A new partnership has applied for 25 top level domain names in this year's ICANN TLD expansion round.”Domain Name Wire (Andrew Allemann)
- Band chosen: 30-49, usable but limited. Anime is a large, passionate, global fan culture, so a semantically perfect string like .anime should draw steady hobbyist and community registrations, and the applicant context helps: Oinkadot is a partnership between Ray King (CEO of Porkbun) and Todd Han (CEO of Dynadot), both of whom run consumer registrars, which plausibly improves retail distribution and visibility at launch. But the buyers with money in this space, studios, licensors, streaming platforms, and large merch retailers, are brand-conservative and, by analogy with how fandom-oriented TLDs have played out, tend to stay on legacy domains while fan projects cluster on cheap or free namespaces (analogy: .moe, an anime-adjacent TLD, remained a niche fan namespace rather than a category standard; count and revenue figures unknown). That points to volume-and-price demand with a thin aftermarket, which is squarely this band. Not the band above (50-69) because genuine primary-identity use by serious, revenue-bearing projects looks likely to be sporadic rather than sustained, and the aftermarket for anime-related second-level strings is unproven, with fan culture historically favoring platforms (social media, wikis, Discord-style hubs) over standalone domains. Not the band below (10-29) because demand here is not merely event-driven or joke-driven: the fandom is durable, global, and produces a continuous stream of new sites, podcasts, communities, and small commerce ventures over any 5-year window, which supports real, if modest, registration volume. Main market uncertainty: whether anime-fandom web activity over the next 5 years happens on standalone domains at all, versus consolidating further onto platforms, which would cap this TLD at defensive and hobbyist registrations regardless of how well it is distributed.