.donate
Is .donate a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
.donate is contested: 4 applications for it are on ICANN’s Reveal Day list, as of 7 October 2026. They are Innovation Service, Public Interest Registry, Intercap and Link Freedom Group.
Who is applying, and what they run today
Three of the four already run TLDs, 12.90M names between them. Three run one of .donate's closest 2012 strings: Public Interest Registry .charity, Public Interest Registry .gives and Public Interest Registry .giving. Link Freedom Group runs none.
Will names sell?
Useful label for donation pages and campaigns, but charities build their identity on .org, so it stays a side-door address.
Last round the AI scored the 2012 strings blind to their fate. Strings it scored 60 or more hold a median 27,168 names today; those under 30, a median of 30. .donate’s closest 2012 strings hold .gives 4K, .giving 2K and .charity 5K.
The nearest 2012 strings, and how many names each holds today
The closest 2012 string, .gives, held 4,222 names, June 2026. .giving held 2,023; .charity held 4,991. Chosen by AI from every string in the 2012 round, without being told what happened to any of them.
Same bet exactly: a giving-verb sold as a call-to-action suffix to nonprofits and campaigns, where value depends on the string reading as a fundraising button rather than an organizational identity.
The gerund form of the identical wager — a philanthropy-action word aimed at the same charity/foundation/campaign buyer, monetized as donation-page and appeal-microsite real estate rather than primary corporate identity.
Same sector and same buyer pool with the same trust-signal premise, but it is the category noun an organization puts its identity on, whereas the target is an action word most naturally used as a transaction endpoint.
Where they meet elsewhere
Link Freedom Group and Intercap face each other in 31 contests this round, .donate included.
- Link Freedom Group × Intercap
- Link Freedom Group × Innovation Service
- Intercap × Innovation Service
nonprofits, charities, churches, and fundraising platforms that want a memorable giving-page address, typically as a campaign redirect alongside an established main site
What a .donate domain is
.donate is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, in our Commerce category. 4 applications for it are on ICANN’s Reveal Day list.
Is the .donate domain extension real yet?
.donate 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 .donate domain?
You can’t yet. A .donate name can only be registered once the string is delegated (added to the DNS root) and its registry opens. Last round's closest parallel to .donate was .gives, delegated on 4 June 2014.
Is .donate a real TLD?
Not yet. .donate is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because .donate is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list of applied-for strings. Every entry on this page links to its source.
- 3 applicants · first recordedICANN
- Link Freedom Group · now confirmedICANN
- Link Freedom Group · first recordedLink Freedom Group
The source’s 4 linesHide the lines
IRI2679T-T70845 · Intercap Registry Inc. · primary · contention set 2026-69 ISL2626T-T51112 · Innovation Service Limited · primary · contention set 2026-69 LFGL2683T-T72478 · Link Freedom Group Ltd · primary · contention set 2026-69 PIR2624T-T89953 · Public Interest Registry · primary · contention set 2026-69
“.donate · Commerce · “No cost, just value.””Link Freedom Group
- Band chosen: 30-49, usable but limited. The string is a clear action word with an obvious use: a donation landing page or campaign URL. But by analogy with charity-adjacent TLDs such as .charity, .foundation, .gives, and .ngo (analogy, outcomes qualitative: none displaced .org as the sector's identity namespace, and their aftermarkets have stayed thin), .donate is likely to be bought as a pointer, not a home. It is not in the 50-69 band because there is no sign of sustained primary-identity demand: a serious nonprofit is unlikely to make something.donate its main address in the next 5 years, and an aftermarket built on redirect-style demand tends to be shallow. It is not in the 10-29 band because the buyer group is real and recurring rather than event-driven: charities, churches, universities, and fundraising platforms continuously need short giving URLs, so registrations on utility (not just price or novelty) are plausible at modest volume. Verified applicant context: the string was announced by Link Freedom Group, which filed more than 300 strings in the ICANN 2026 round and published its catalog before Reveal Day; its catalog lists .donate under Commerce with the tagline 'No cost, just value.' A portfolio applicant of that breadth suggests generic-registry distribution rather than a sector-partnership launch, which qualitatively caps early institutional adoption. Main market uncertainty: whether donation-processing and crowdfunding platforms adopt .donate for per-campaign vanity links, which would create volume demand well beyond one-off charity registrations and could lift it toward the strong-niche band.