I follow domains a bit out of curiosity. I'm pretty bullish on the new TLDs (as a concept), but I would say .com is the only truly safe TLD. It's the only one where an attempt to remove price controls should see a lot of resistance and any other shenanigans will cause outrage.

After that, .net and .org are still pretty safe, but we already saw the first attempt at usurping .org recently. Some of the ccTLDs (country code) look ok if you're a citizen in a developed country. For example, CIRA is a fairly decent registry for .ca (although they seem to have ghosted me after I asked something more than a trivial question of them).

Next is everything else IMO. ICANN and the registries have egregiously mismanaged and squandered every opportunity with the new gTLDs. However, even with that incompetence, the new TLDs seem to be catching on more and more. I think that's an indicator of how successful the industry could be with better leadership.

One of ICANN's primary responsibilities should be to protect registrants from predatory registries. The .storage anecdote in this thread is a good example of ICANN failure IMO. If they want to push adoption of the new gTLDs, ICANN needs to make predictability and risk minimization for registrants their #1 focus.

The second most important thing for ICANN should be to publicize and criticize discrimination against new TLDs. For example, the whole .xyz being blacklisted everywhere that was on the front page a few weeks ago is the kind of thing ICANN should work to resolve.

As for the registries, most of them suck and they're owned / run by private equity. It's the greediest of the greedy as suppliers with toothless oversight from ICANN and they wonder why they can't get any traction. If the large registries like Donuts were managed better, they'd be lobbying ICANN for registrant protections like price controls. They'd also be actively participating in efforts to prevent discrimination against all new TLDs.

Domains have unlimited supply and the pricing games used to create artificial scarcity are pretty stupid. The goal should be to sell more, not to have perfect price discrimination. I don't mind the $100 / year premium domains for super awesome keyword combos because they deter squatting and that's not too expensive for a small business or individual, but it's really unclear what the rules are regarding price increases on those.

There are also secondary markets that are completely ignored. Reputation attestation could be a huge secondary market for domain registries since they're the only ones that have access to identity info now that WHOIS privacy is a default. The TrueNames thing from Donuts kind of goes to that, but it's a gimmick that's 100% tech (no moderation) and doesn't work very well (I can get typos of my domains with 1s instead of ls).

As for real metrics, I've never seen any. The registries are pretty much all private AFAIK. In terms of TLD failure, they have to put up a bond that would allow someone else to run a TLD for something like 10 years, so pure abandonment isn't a risk based on what I know.

Uniregistry is on my personal don't trust list [1] due to increasing pricing on existing domains. Donuts at least grandfathered existing registrants when they increased prices [2]. The registry for .storage will instantly go on my "never deal with" list if I can find info to corroborate the assertion in this thread.

TLDR (IMO); .com is king. .net and .org are ok.

1. https://domainnamewire.com/2017/03/09/uniregistry-new-tld-pr...

2. http://domainincite.com/20538-donuts-new-price-50-price-hike...