.sourcing
Is .sourcing a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
Nobody is chasing .sourcing, 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 legitimate but narrow B2B label for supplier-finding services; few firms would make it their main web address.
sourcing agents, procurement consultancies, and B2B supplier-discovery platforms, particularly in export-heavy manufacturing markets where "sourcing" is the literal service sold
In Journey To The West's published portfolio of 323 strings submitted in the ICANN 2026 round. Their catalog line: “Finding the right supplier, anywhere in the world.”
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: an unowned gerund naming a B2B professional service, sold to the thousands of small firms who describe themselves by that activity and would hang their primary identity on it, with no single incumbent able to claim the word.
Same bet: a generic corporate-function gerund whose value rests on agencies and in-house teams in that function adopting it as their name, betting the function is big and self-identifying enough to sustain a registry.
Same bet on the procurement/supply-chain vocabulary being commercially ownable at the right of the dot, sold to the same B2B buyer, though it is a bare noun better suited to descriptive phrase names than to a firm's primary identity.
What a .sourcing domain is
.sourcing is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, filed under Commerce. Nobody is chasing .sourcing today. The applicants that claimed it are out.
Is the .sourcing domain extension real yet?
.sourcing 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 .sourcing domain?
You can’t yet. A .sourcing 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 .sourcing was .consulting, delegated on 1 April 2014.
Is .sourcing a real TLD?
Not yet. .sourcing is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because an applicant claimed .sourcing 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
“.sourcing · Trade & Logistics · “Finding the right supplier, anywhere in the world.””Journey To The West Corporation
- "Sourcing" is a real, globally understood procurement term, so the string has genuine descriptive utility for sourcing agencies and supplier-discovery platforms. By analogy (flagged as such), comparable descriptive B2B strings like .supply, .trade, and .services drew mostly price-driven registrations with weak primary-identity use and thin aftermarkets — B2B buyers overwhelmingly anchor on .com for credibility with overseas counterparties, and an unfamiliar TLD can read as risky in cross-border trade. That places .sourcing at the bottom of the 30-49 'usable but limited' band: above 10-29 because it is a serious industry category with plausible functional use (geo- or vertical-labeled sourcing agencies), not vanity; below 50-69 because there is no visible precedent of sustained demand or serious primary-identity adoption for analogous B2B descriptive TLDs. Main market uncertainty: whether procurement and export-agency businesses, especially China-linked ones serving Western buyers, will adopt descriptive-TLD identities at all over the next 5 years, since trust conventions in that segment are conservative.