March, 2002
The "common knowledge" is that the new TLDs (.biz, .info, and so on) have been pretty much of a failure for the TLD owners because the only people who have registered in them are trademark holders or domain name squatters. You almost never see any of the new TLDs being used on the net.
To test out this hypothesis, I wanted to see if they were being used for easy-to-find web sites. I took the list of the 300 most commonly-used words in English (found here) and searched for them on Google. I went ten pages deep on each search, grabbing every URL Google gave me. Of these 3000-odd URLs, exactly two of them used a new TLD: aaronland.info and www.nic.name. I assume that the latter came up on searching for the word "name", so it is almost not even countable.
The sponsored TLDs are not doing any better. Search on Google for "museum" and see if you can find a dot-museum name in the first ten pages. (This exercise is quite fun for other reasons: you'll find some great and some wacky museums). Lots of the museums in these pages have registered their names under dot-museum, but they aren't using their names.
It appears that almost no one is using the names they have registered. ICANN's handling of the addition of new TLDs has done little or nothing to relieve the pressure for new name spaces. Maybe it's time for a new model, such as adding 50 or 100 new and unsponsored TLDs with names that people want.