.club Domain Prices — Compare 46 Registrars

The .CLUB domain was obtained as a result of ICANN's 2012 new gTLD round, with three applicants bidding for it. A start-up based in Fort Lauderdale called .CLUB Domains raised $7 million from 27 investors and won the right to it in a private auction held in June 2013, outbidding Donuts and a Canadian law firm.

The registry agreement was signed with ICANN in November 2013, it was included in the root zone on 18 January 2014 and became available to the public on 7 May 2014. People can register a .club name even though the name suggests that you have to operate a club. The company carried out an extensive marketing campaign, which included a launch event with the rapper 50 Cent at 50inda.club in May 2014 (ICANNWiki).

It was one of the larger new extensions and reached over one million registrations. In April 2021 GoDaddy acquired it, and from that summer on Registry Services LLC, GoDaddy's registry division, became the operator (Domain Name Wire). Since GoDaddy had already been managing the .club technical systems, the change amounted to little more than a change of ownership.

Before it became generally available, .club went through the standard launch stages for new extensions: a sunrise period for trademark holders which started on 28 January 2014, after which came a landrush in April. The company that operated it was headed by founder and CEO Colin Campbell and had only ever offered this one extension. In December 2016 China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology gave approval for .club, thereby allowing Chinese owners to obtain the local licence required to host .club sites inside China. That announcement included the approval of only three new generic extensions, the rest being .xyz and .vip. The registry does support internationalised domain names, so .club domains can be written using non-Latin scripts. GoDaddy acquired .club in the same month that it agreed to buy most of the extensions from Minds + Machines, including .vip.