.contest
Is .contest a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
Nobody has applied for .contest in its own right, as of 7 October 2026. Intercap named .contest as the replacement string of its .project application.
A campaign-page address for giveaways and competitions: memorable for a promotion, rarely a brand's main home.
marketing teams and agencies running giveaways, sweepstakes, hackathons and creative competitions who want a short campaign microsite address (brand.contest), plus contest-platform and prize-promotion vendors
No applications recorded for this TLD yet.
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: a plain-English singular noun naming a marketing mechanic rather than an industry, sold to brands and agencies who register a disposable campaign-activation address instead of moving their permanent identity, so its value depends on recurring short-lived promotional registrations.
Same bet on the generic noun for a prize-and-entry mechanic bought by the operators who run it, but the string carries a regulated-gambling meaning that narrows the buyer pool compared with a neutral competition word.
Same bet that organizers of a time-bounded participation event will put the event, not their own brand, on a generic process-noun string, with the same dependency on a steady supply of one-off events rather than durable primary identities.
What a .contest domain is
.contest is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, filed under Commerce. Nobody has applied for .contest in its own right. It is named on ICANN’s list as part of an application for another string.
Is the .contest domain extension real yet?
.contest is not yet a domain extension you can register: nothing resolves under it, and no registrar sells names in it. Nobody has applied for it on the public record; the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round is the process that would decide whether it becomes one.
When can you buy a .contest domain?
You can’t yet. ICANN publishes every applied-for string on Reveal Day, 7 October 2026 at 18:00 UTC. A .contest name can only be registered after that, once the string is delegated and its registry opens. Last round's closest parallel to .contest was .promo, delegated on 31 December 2015.
Is .contest a real TLD?
Not yet. .contest is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because ICANN’s list names .contest as part of an application for another string. Every entry on this page links to its source.
- Intercap · first recordedICANN
“IRI2679T-T57402 · Intercap Registry Inc. · replacement string of .project”ICANN
“EDI2665T-T28371 · Endpoint Domains, Inc. · primary IRI2679T-T96997 · Intercap Registry Inc. · replacement string of .wiz · Deactivated NA2626T-T63059 · ShortDot (Ireland) Limited · replacement string of .ask · Deactivated XL2625T-T48604 · XYZ.COM LLC · replacement string of .con · Deactivated”ICANN
- Band chosen: 10-29 (vanity/joke/narrow), at its upper edge. The string is a clear, unambiguous English word with an obvious use case: a promotion or competition microsite, with the natural pattern brand.contest or product.contest. That use is real but inherently event-driven: contests run for weeks, the page is retired, and the registration is rarely renewed as a primary identity, so demand is shallow and churn-prone rather than sustained. By analogy (flagged as analogy), promotional-verb and campaign strings from the earlier new-gTLD round (.promo, .win, .deals, .vote-style strings) saw mostly defensive, campaign, or price-driven registrations with thin aftermarkets and little recurring primary-identity use; a contest-platform vendor might adopt it as a brand, but that is a small buyer pool. It is not in the 30-49 band because the registrations that happen are tied to individual campaigns rather than volume or ongoing operations, and the string gives a site no durable credibility; it is not in the 1-9 band because the word is universally understood, the brand.contest pattern is intuitive to non-experts, and prize-promotion and hackathon marketing is a recurring, if seasonal, spend. Applicant fact (neutral, from the record): the only recorded application is from Intercap Registry Inc. as a replacement string for .project, with a contention count of 0; an operator that already runs other TLDs informs adoption likelihood only, not the string's market. Main market uncertainty: whether registrar channels will promote the string to campaign marketers at retail (which could lift volume into the 30-49 band) or whether it will sit largely unmarketed as a secondary string, in which case demand stays occasional and renewal-weak. Regulatory friction around sweepstakes and prize promotions in many jurisdictions could also chill brand use of a string that signals a contest; the direction of that effect over the next five years is unknown.