.sample
Is .sample a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
Nobody is chasing .sample, as of 7 October 2026. One applicant claimed it and is out. We keep the entry on the record either way.
- Journey To The West
A word that means "not the real thing" — handy for sample-order pages, but few serious projects would live at a .sample address.
manufacturers, wholesalers and sourcing platforms offering product-sample orders; secondarily music-sample libraries and marketing teams running free-sample promotions
In Journey To The West's published portfolio of 323 strings submitted in the ICANN 2026 round. Their catalog line: “The first piece, before the big order.”
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 thin, singular English marketing-utility noun with no industry vertical and no registrant who would put a primary identity on it, sold instead as a campaign or secondary address for brands running offers.
Same underlying commercial premise of try-it-at-no-cost as the hook, played as a broad meaning-soft common word whose value is marketing pull rather than any defined registrant category.
Another no-charge giveaway word aimed at promotional usage rather than an occupation or community base, though its language-specific audience narrows the buyer pool in a way .sample's plain English does not.
What a .sample domain is
.sample is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, in our Commerce category. Nobody is chasing .sample today. The applicants that claimed it are out.
Is the .sample domain extension real yet?
.sample 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 .sample domain?
You can’t yet. A .sample 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 .sample was .promo, delegated on 31 December 2015.
Is .sample a real TLD?
Not yet. .sample is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because an applicant claimed .sample and is no longer in it. We keep the entry, and every entry on this page links to its source.
- Journey To The West · now abandonedICANN
- Journey To The West · first recordedJourney To The West Corporation
“.sample · Trade & Logistics · “The first piece, before the big order.””Journey To The West Corporation
- The string's core meaning works against primary-identity use: in web convention 'sample' reads as placeholder or demo content, so a business at brand.sample risks looking like a mock-up rather than the real site. The catalog framing ('the first piece, before the big order') points at B2B sourcing sample orders, a real workflow, but by analogy with narrow-function commerce strings like .promo or .gift — which settled into low-volume, price-driven registration rather than primary identities — .sample would likely serve at most campaign or microsite duty (analogy, not figures). A secondary music-sample or free-sample-marketing audience exists but is event-driven and shallow, again by analogy with novelty-word TLDs. Known real-world demand for the string is unknown; portfolio-scale application context (323 submitted strings per the facts block) suggests speculative breadth rather than a committed vertical operator, which tempers adoption likelihood. This lands in the 10-29 band: it is below 'usable but limited' because the word actively undercuts credibility as a main address, and above 1-9 because sample-request microsites and promo campaigns give it a plausible, if thin, functional niche. Main market uncertainty: whether any large B2B sourcing or wholesale ecosystem standardizes sample-order landing pages on the string, which would move it toward functional-volume territory.