.watch Domain
Time for a Dedicated Domain
Register your .watch domain from just £37.99/yr. Free DNS management, email forwarding, and 10GB mailbox included with every domain.
What is a .watch domain?
The .watch domain serves two audiences. Watch retailers and luxury timepiece dealers use it for its obvious product connection. Video streaming platforms and media publishers use it because "watch" also means "view content". This dual meaning gives .watch more versatility than most product-specific TLDs.
Who should register .watch?
Watch retailers, luxury timepiece dealers, video streaming platforms, and media content publishers.
Why choose .watch?
- Dual meaning: timepieces and video
- Versatile across retail and media
- Memorable for repeat visitors
- Works for luxury and everyday brands
Who runs .watch, and since when
Registry data from the .watch delegation record held by IANA, which maintains the internet's root zone. Eligibility comes from the registry's own policy, and the prices are ours.
- Extension type
- Generic (gTLD)
- Registry operator
- Binky Moon, LLC
- The organisation that runs the extension
- In the root zone since
- 2014
- Delegated 16 January 2014
- Who can register
- Open to anyone worldwide, whether you sell timepieces, stream video or neither
- Checked against the registry's own policy
- Our price
- £37.99 a year
- Ex VAT. Renews at the same price
The two meanings behind a .watch domain
There is a second watch extension, and knowing about it changes how you read this one. IANA records .watches, the plural, entering the root zone in November 2015 under Richemont DNS Inc., the registry arm of the Swiss luxury group, before passing to Afilias and then to Identity Digital. The singular .watch arrived earlier, on 16 January 2014 under Sand Shadow, LLC, and moved to Binky Moon, LLC in the March 2018 transfer. So the horology industry built its own address space next door, and .watch was left carrying two meanings instead of one.
Those two meanings are the reason people shortlist it. Watch is a noun, a thing on a wrist. Watch is also a verb, an instruction to view. A vintage dealer and a video platform both find the word doing exactly what they want, and it is one of very few descriptive extensions that reads as a call to action.
The problem is that it does both at once. Said aloud, yourname.watch is ambiguous in a way yourname.toys never is, and the listener has to hold the question until you explain it. For a video product that costs nothing, because the site answers it in a second. For a retailer selling four-figure timepieces to a cautious buyer, an address that could be either is a small friction at precisely the wrong moment.
Registration is open to anyone in any country, with nothing to prove and no sector check of any kind.
Is .watch the right choice for you?
We would rather sell you the right extension once than the wrong one twice.
.watch works well if
- You are launching a video product, a live stream or a channel, where watch as an instruction is exactly the message you want.
- You deal in vintage or specialist timepieces and want an address that names the category without a hyphen in it.
- You want a call to action in the address itself, such as a campaign site where the whole point is to press play.
- The .com and .co.uk you wanted have gone, and every alternative pads the name with words nobody says out loud.
Look elsewhere if
- Said aloud it is ambiguous. Listeners cannot tell whether you sell watches or show video, so you end up explaining it every time.
- You sell high-value timepieces to nervous buyers, where an unfamiliar extension is one more doubt on a page asking for four figures.
- Your customers are UK based and search locally, where a .co.uk carries a country signal that no generic extension can.
Selling watches to UK customers rather than streaming anything? The .co.uk is cheaper and reads as local. See .co.uk pricing.
.watch vs .com: which should you register?
The choice against .com comes down to whether the ambiguity helps you or hurts you. A .com says nothing about the site, which is safe. A .watch says two things at once, which is memorable for a video product and awkward for a jeweller.
.com is the safer default for retail: typed by habit, understood by every customer, and never needing a sentence of explanation on a phone call. .watch works harder when the address is meant to be an instruction, because the reader is being told what to do rather than where they are.
If you sell watches and can have both, put the .com or the .co.uk on the receipt and keep the .watch for the campaign. The address that has to survive a bad phone line should be the plain one.
| .watch | .com | |
|---|---|---|
| Meaning | Timepiece and view, at once | None attached |
| In the root zone since | 16 January 2014 | 1985 |
| Said over the phone | Often needs explaining | Never |
| Short names left | A reasonable choice | Very few without hyphens |
| Annual cost | Several times a .co.uk | Low |
.watch domain questions, answered
What people ask us before registering a .watch domain.
Can't find what you're looking for?
Ask us directlyThey are separate top-level domains with separate registrations. IANA records .watch entering the root zone on 16 January 2014, and .watches in November 2015, the plural delegated to Richemont DNS Inc., the registry company of the Swiss luxury group, before later transfers. Both sit under Identity Digital today. The singular reads as an instruction as much as a product, while the plural reads only as timepieces. Owning one gives you no claim on the other, so a dealer who wants both has to register both.
No. Nothing in the registry policy limits it to video, and watch retailers, repairers and collectors hold .watch domains as readily as streaming projects do. The extension is open to anyone in any country with no sector check at all. The practical question is not what you are allowed to do with it, but what a stranger assumes on reading it, and the answer to that splits depending on the name in front of the dot.
It can dilute it, which is not quite the same thing. Buyers spending four figures on a timepiece read the address bar as one of several trust signals, alongside the certificate, the returns policy and the payment page. An extension they have never seen adds a question at the moment you want none. That is manageable when the .watch is a campaign page pointing at an established .com or .co.uk, and riskier when it is the only address the business owns.
Yes, as a paid add-on. Free privacy applies only to .uk domains, where Nominet does not publish a UK individual registrant's name and address by default. On .watch and every other generic extension your registration details go into the public record unless you add a privacy service, which matters if you trade from a home address. Ask us before you order and we will confirm what gets published for your case and what the add-on costs.
Included with Your .watch Domain
DNS Management
Full DNS zone editor to manage A, CNAME, MX, TXT, and all record types.
Email Forwarding
Set up professional email addresses and forward to any inbox.
Auto-Renewal
Never lose your domain with automatic renewal protection.
Free 10GB Mailbox
One 10GB mailbox (POP3/IMAP) included with every domain, on any TLD.
The Free Mailbox Sends Your Email. DKIM Proves It Was You.
Your domain comes with a real 10 GB mailbox. Signing what you send is the part that happens on a mail server rather than in DNS.
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SPF
Free with your domainSender Policy Framework. A DNS record naming the servers allowed to send mail for your domain. It vouches for the connection rather than the message, so it stops verifying as soon as anyone forwards what you sent.
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DKIM
Needs a mail server that signsDomainKeys Identified Mail. Your mail server signs every message on the way out, and the receiving server checks that signature against a key in your DNS. It covers the message itself, so it survives a forward where SPF cannot.
DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=yourdomain.co.uk; s=default; t=1790160000; h=from:to:subject:date:message-id; bh=2jUSOH9NhtVGCQWNr9BrIAPreKQjO6Sn7XIkfJVOzv8=; b=NpX0k2f1oW8tR6yQzLm4cVb7JhTdEu...The header a signing mail server adds. d=is your domain andb=is the signature proving the message came from it. A domain on its own has no server to write that header. -
DMARC
Meaningful once DKIM is in placeDomain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance. The policy telling a receiving server what to do with mail that fails those checks, and where to send the reports. It only bites once SPF or DKIM lines up with the address you send from.
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Register your .watch domain today
Secure your .watch domain from just £37.99/yr. Free DNS management, email forwarding, and 10GB mailbox included.
