Team Internet says revenue beat estimates

Team Internet gave a preview of its 2023 earnings report this morning, saying that revenue grew faster than its own targets and analysts’ estimates.

The company, formerly CentraNic, expects to post revenue around $835 million, up 15% on 2022, and profit up 12% at $96 million for the year.

The firm’s Online Presence segment, which includes the domains business, had revenue up 16% at $179 million, while the far larger Online Marketing segment saw revenue up 14% at $656 million.

Team Internet will report its full results on March 18.

.ru domains fly off the shelf as Western sanctions bite

Russia’s ccTLD has posted very impressive growth in registrations for 2023, attributable largely to sanctions related to the country’s invasion of Ukraine.

ccTLD.ru, the registry for .ru and .рф, reported that it ended 2023 with 5,439,137 .ru domains, an increase of 506,024 or 10.3% over the year. It said 85% of the names were registered by Russians.

It said 1,709,718 new domains were registered in .ru, with over 200,000 being registered per month by December.

For comparison with fellow top-10 ccTLDs, Germany’s .de grew by 201,000 names last year, and Brazil’s .br grew by 220,000. The UK’s .uk shrank and the Netherlands’ .nl was basically flat.

In the smaller Cyrllic .рф, the growth rate was even greater — 13.7%, with 768,883 domains in total at the end of the year, up 92,769 names, the registry said.

Despite the rapid growth, .ru is still a bit off its 2017 peak of around 5.53 million domains, according to my database.

In a press release, ccTLD.ru director Andrey Vorobyev admitted that one of the “main drivers” of the growth were Russians transferring their sites to Russia “under the pressure of sanctions”.

After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, many domain registries and registrars in the West unilaterally decided to stop doing business with Russian citizens and organizations, despite US government sanctions specifically not applying to domains.

GoDaddy cut off Russians and .ru while Namecheap, which has many support staff in Ukraine, cut off Russian customers and continues to prominently fund-raise for Ukraine on its storefront. Other companies announcing boycotts included 101domain, IONOS and Nominet.

Ukraine’s ccTLD, .ua, has fared less well during the crisis. Its total domain count shrank by about 77,000 to 514,000 in 2023, according to my database. The local registry, Hostmaster, had frozen deletions for a period to give people who had been displaced or mobilized more time to renew, but started releasing those domains last year.

Hostmaster has reported adoption of certain third-level geographic .ua domains that use Latin transliterations of Ukrainian place names, rather than Russian — .kyiv.ua versus .kiev.ua for example — as citizens seek to “de-Russify” their holdings.

Lebanon’s ccTLD going back to Lebanon after ICANN takeover

ICANN’s board of directors has voted to redelegate Lebanon’s ccTLD to the country’s local Internet Society chapter, six months after the Org took it over as an emergency caretaker.

The resolution, passed at the weekend, as usual with ccTLD redelegations does not get into any depth about the switch, other than to note IANA has ticked all the requisition procedural boxes. IANA will publish a report at a later date.

ICANN took over the ccTLD, .lb, last July after the former registry was left in limbo following the sudden death of its founder and manager. It was only the second time ICANN had made itself a ccTLD’s “caretaker”.

The board also voted at the weekend to redelegate Cameroon’s .cm, best-known in the Anglophone world for enabling .com typos purely by existing, to Agence Nationale des Technologies de l’Information et de la Communication, the local technology ministry.

You can’t use money to buy .box domains

In what is probably the strangest domain launch to date, the crypto-focused new gTLD .box has gone on sale, but you can’t use actual money to buy domains there.

The unique selling point of .box domains is that they work on both the regular consensus DNS — .box is an ICANN-approved and contracted gTLD — and the Ethereum Name Service blockchain alt-root, so registrants can use their domains to address their crypto wallets.

From a business model perspective, registry Intercap is doing a lot of things differently.

For starters, it’s not accepting hard currency. The regular general availability price at My.Box, which appears to be the only registrar, is $120 a year, but you can only pay in crypto coins — either Ethereum or USD Coin, a crypto coin that has its value linked 1:1 to the US dollar.

My.Box is using ICANN-accredited top-10 registrar NameSilo to register names, but NameSilo’s own web store does not appear to support them.

The current Early Access Period is also different to the norm. Instead of the price reducing by a certain amount every day at midnight, it’s constantly ticking down, minute by minute, at a rate of 50% a day, so you can get a name for less if you just hang on a few hours (or minutes, or seconds).

EAP pricing started at $7,680 last Thursday and at time of publication is around $470. Judging by zone files, about 30 domains have been sold during EAP so far.

Dropping domains pricing is also handled in what I believe is a unique way. Instead of dropped domains entering the available pool at regular GA pricing, they instead are returned to EAP pricing — so they’ll cost $7,680 to re-register the moment after they drop and you’ll have to wait a full seven days to get them at the regular base price..

I can see the potential for controversy here, but it doesn’t seem much different to registrars auctioning off their customers’ domains after they expire.

My.Box also asks its customers to manage their domain via its app, and it does not allow them to assign their own nameservers — they have to use the nameservers assigned by the registry.

.ing doing way better than .meme

Google Registry launched two new gTLDs in December, and just over a month later one is doing way better than the other.

As of the latest zone files, .ing has over 16,000 domains, while .meme has just 2,700. Both went to general availability on December 5.

This might seem surprising, given that .ing is intended purely for domain hacks, but memes are of course ephemeral things where registering a matching domain might not be a sound long-term investment strategy.

Both Google launches pale in comparison to the registry’s most successful gTLD, .app, which sold over 250,000 names in its first month, May 2018.

INCO flips a gTLD to Identity Digital

Internet Naming Co has sold one of its gTLDs to Identity Digital, barely a year after taking it from UNR.

The Registry Agreement for .juegos — Spanish for “games” — was assigned to ID subsidiary Dog Beach in early December, according to ICANN records.

ID already runs the English-language .games, while XYZ runs the singular .game. There is no singular gTLD in the Spanish.

.juegos in volume terms has been a disappointment. Originally with UNR predecessor Uniregistry, it peaked at 2,353 domains under management in 2016, when names were priced at around $20 a year.

But the gTLD was affected by Uniregistry’s decision to massively increase prices to compensate for weak volume in 2017, which caused some of the leading registrars to drop the TLDs from their storefront.

To this day, GoDaddy still does not carry .juegos, but Tucows seems to have started selling it again, at an eye-watering $500 a year. Wholesale pricing is believed to be $300 a year. Namecheap sells it for $368 a year.

.juegos had 649 domains under management at the last count. The largest registrar in Entorno, which unsurprisingly based in Spain.

INCO took over .juegos, along with a bunch of other former Uniregistry gTLDs, in late 2022.

It will be interesting to see if ID reduces prices to match .games, which is believed to wholesale at $20 a year.

Anguilla fears the .ai junk drop

A junk drop is an anxiety-inducing prospect for any domain registry, but what if the registry is a national government and domain revenues are suddenly a huge portion of the money it has to spend on public services?

That’s the situation the Caribbean island of Anguilla finds itself in today, having benefited from a huge windfall last year with the sale of .ai domains but not a guarantee that its hundreds of thousands of new registrants will stick around.

Speaking to the local legislature in mid-December, Premier Ellis Webster said that .ai sales brought in a projected 77.18 million East Caribbean Dollars ($28.5 million) in 2023, compared to its start-of-year budget estimate of EC$24 million ($8.9 million).

That’s a huge chunk — about 20% — of the government’s overall 2023 revenue of EC$399.13 million ($148 million).

Just two years earlier, before the popularization of AI with the rise of tools such as ChatGPT, domains were bringing in just shy of EC$20 million ($7.4 million) against an overall government revenue of EC$220 million ($81.4 million).

But it seems Webster has been well-advised on the speculative nature of the domain name industry. He told lawmakers .ai’s performance was “a moment of pride and potential” but added that it “also calls for a moment of introspection and caution”.

The main beneficiary of the new domain money will be the development of Anguilla’s small single airport and growing the island’s important tourism sector, Webster indicated, something governments have been promising for years. Roads and schools will also see investment.

Anguilla is a British overseas territory with an estimated population of about 16,000.

According to a transcript of his remarks (pdf), Webster said:

We must acknowledge that these revenue streams, while robust, are not under the direct control of our government. The digital landscape is ever-changing, and what seems like a perennial source today can rapidly evolve tomorrow…

Our approach must be balanced — leveraging this opportunity to enhance our infrastructure and services while maintaining a diversified and sustainable revenue base. This will ensure that we do not find ourselves in a precarious position should the dynamics of the digital domain market shift

While .ai may be somewhat resistant to over-speculation due to its high prices (up to 10x .com, depending where you buy), those high prices may also inspire speculators to let their names drop if the .ai aftermarket fails to live up to expectations.

It seems certain that AI is going to become an all-pervasive force in human civilization in the coming years, but there’s always the risk that the same might not be true of .ai.

Five more gTLDs get launch dates

Internet Naming Co has revealed the launch dates for the five dormant gTLDs it acquired late last year.

The company plans to go to Sunrise with .diy, .food, .lifestyle, .living, and .vana on January 24, according to ICANN records.

Before general availability on March 6, there’ll be a week-long Early Access Period, with prices starting at $25,000 wholesale and decreasing daily to settle at GA prices.

Unusually, and I think uniquely, there’s also going to be a 24-hour “Customer Loyalty Period” on February 28/29, which has the same prices as day one of EAP.

INCO CEO Shayan Rostam told me this period “gives us the opportunity to provision domains to certain existing customers or partners after sunrise but before GA.” He described it as a “1-day pioneer program phase for the registry.”

The five gTLDs were bought from Lifestyle Domain Holdings last year, as the would-be registry carried on dumping or selling off its portfolio of long-unused gTLDs.

.vana was a brand, but INCO plans to use it to do something as-yet-unrevealed related to blockchain naming systems. .diy refers to “Do It Yourself”, the practice of carrying out home improvements or repairs without hiring professional experts.

All of the five will be unrestricted. They’ve all been moved to the Tucows back-end registry service provider.

Almost 50,000 .ai domains sold in a quarter

The Government of Anguilla continued to benefit from the rising popularity of artificial intelligence in the fourth quarter of 2023, with almost 50,000 more .ai domains being registered.

As of December 20, there were 353,928 .ai domains, compared to 306,861 on September 26, an increase of 47,067, according to the registry’s web site. That’s an increase of 105,319 compared to the number reported June 14.

Over 100,000 names in half a year is pretty impressive for a tiny island territory — comparable to growth in ccTLDs for far more populous nations such as Germany (.de) and Brazil (.br) — and it comes despite the relatively hefty price tag .ai commands.

At the major registrars today, you’re likely to pay $60 to $80 a year for an initial registration, with a two-year minimum. Renewals are about ten bucks more.

There’s certainly a certain degree of speculation going on here, but it’s far lower than you typically see in heavily discounted gTLDs.

The increased popularity seems to have come with increased abuse risk. The registry’s operator has hastily updated the terms of service a few times over the last year, making more types of conduct unacceptable.

Life insurance company kills dot-brand

An American life insurance company’s gTLD has become the 25th dot-brand to be abandoned in 2023.

The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America has asked ICANN to cancel its contract to run .guardian, which it has barely used.

The company had been running a newsletter at connect.guardian but interest in that seems to have dried up around 2020. No other .guardian domains had been registered.

It had been in a bit of a scuffle with UK newspaper publisher Guardian News and Media, which also applied for .guardian, during the application process.

The publisher settled for .theguardian instead, but abandoned that post-delegation in 2016, after selling sister newspaper brand .observer to Identity Digital.

Assuming the termination is not withdrawn, it will leave ICANN with 375 contracted dot-brands, from its initial total of 494.