.venue
Is .venue a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
.venue is not contested. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list, as of 7 October 2026. It is Squarespace. Momentous Corporation named .venue as a backup string for its .hall application. ICANN deactivated it, because another applicant applied for the same string or named it as a backup.
A clear, honest label for event and wedding spaces, but most venues will keep their .com and treat this as a side door.
event spaces, wedding halls, music clubs, conference centres and rental rooms that want a name describing exactly what they are, plus booking platforms listing them
Named on the ICANN gTLD application list, 7 October 2026 as a replacement (backup) string of the applicant's .hall application, shown as deactivated: another applicant applied for the same string or named it as a backup
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 bare category noun for a physical place-of-assembly, whose primary identity holders are the independent operators of the room itself (plus the ticketing and listing layer around them), betting that an operator will re-anchor its name on the building-type word rather than its own brand.
Also a generic noun naming a commercial establishment people gather at, sold to owner-operators of individual properties, but the bet is propped up by a far deeper travel-booking economy and chain brands, so the demand case is less dependent on tiny local operators than .venue's.
Same shape of bet — a generic establishment noun aimed at fragmented, mostly single-location local businesses that already have a name and a .com, so it has to win on descriptive clarity alone, which is exactly .venue's dependency.
What a .venue domain is
.venue is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, filed under Commerce. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list.
Is the .venue domain extension real yet?
.venue 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 .venue domain?
You can’t yet. ICANN publishes every applied-for string on Reveal Day, 7 October 2026 at 18:00 UTC. A .venue name can only be registered after that, once the string is delegated and its registry opens. Last round's closest parallel to .venue was .theater, delegated on 6 May 2015.
Is .venue a real TLD?
Not yet. .venue is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because .venue is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list of applied-for strings. Every entry on this page links to its source.
- Band chosen: 30-49, usable but limited. The string is a plain English noun that maps to a real, sizeable business type (event spaces, wedding and banquet halls, live-music rooms, conference centres), so registrations will happen and some owners will use a .venue address as their site name, especially where the matching .com is taken. The record shows one confirmed standard application from Squarespace Registry LLC, a company whose core business is selling websites to small businesses, including hospitality and events operators; by analogy with registrars that bundle their own strings into a site-builder flow, that distribution channel is the most likely driver of volume, flagged as analogy. It is not in the 50-69 band because, by analogy with existing noun TLDs serving a single trade (.events, .restaurant, .cafe, .bar), primary-identity use has been the exception rather than the norm: operators tend to keep a .com for trust and search, and the aftermarket for such strings has been thin, so the TLD itself adds little brand credibility and demand still needs explaining. It is not in the 10-29 band because unlike a joke or vanity string, the word has a durable commercial meaning, a defined buyer group that renews, and a plausible sales channel, so demand is not purely event-driven or memorable-only. Main market uncertainty: whether venue operators, who often live inside booking marketplaces and social platforms rather than their own site, treat a descriptive domain as an identity worth paying for or as an optional redirect; the counts of registrations and renewals for the closest analogues are unknown to me under the rules here, so the judgment is qualitative.