Was I wrong? .xyz claims 31,000 regs on day one

.xyz’s first full day of general availability saw it total 31,119 registrations, suggesting that it’s not doing as badly as I suggested in a post earlier today.
Today’s .xyz zone file shows 14,924 names, up 14,829 on the day, but Gavin Brown, CTO of .xyz back-end CentralNic, just commented that the 24-hour number is actually 31,119.
The zone files for each new gTLD are made available by ICANN — assuming the Centralized Zone Data Service is working — at 0100 UTC every day. Brown said that .xyz’s file today was generated an hour later.
That means the 14,924 total represented the first 10 hours of GA, as indicated in my original piece today.
For a new gTLD to sell more domains in the second half of its first GA day than during the first is unusual, because gTLD launches to date have tended to rely quite heavily on pre-orders.
Pre-orders, a decent measure of demand, generally hit the registry within the first few minutes of general availability, as registrars try to secure the names their customers want.
That has the effect of stacking first-day registrations heavily towards the first few hours of GA.
Take .club, for example. It sold 25,776 names in its first 10 hours. But 24 hours later that number had crept up to just 30,680, an increase of just 4,904.
Similarly, TLD Registry’s .在线 moved just shy of 20,000 names in its first 12 hours of general availability, but had sold only 1,000 more names a full 24 hours later.
I didn’t think it unreasonable to assume that .xyz would follow the same pattern, but this front-loading doesn’t seem to have happened in .xyz’s case.
Did I make a faulty assumption?
If registrations are indeed coming in at a more measured pace than preceding launches, then .xyz may not be falling behind CEO Daniel Negari’s aggressive growth targets at all.
Was I wrong to say that .xyz hasn’t lived up to the hype? Maybe. We’ll need some more days of data to be sure.

14 Comments Tagged: .xyz, general availability, new gTLDs

.xyz fails to live up to the hype

.xyz sold just shy of 15,000 domain names during its first hours of general availability.
That’s according to zone files released today.
The registry added 14,829 names yesterday, ending the period with 14,924 in its zone, making it the 15th-largest new gTLD by volume, behind the likes of .center, .directory and .solutions.
(UPDATE: see the bottom of this post for important updates on these numbers.)
While it’s a respectable first-day performance — logging more sales that I expected it to — it’s doesn’t look like the registry is going to hit CEO Daniel Negari’s target of a million names in year one.
Earlier this week, Negari enthusiastically blogged, in a post tagged simply “believe”:

There is no doubt in my mind that the growth rate of .xyz will surpass the growth rate of .com. It won’t take us 20 years to reach one million registrations. It will only take 1 year. The growing number of internet users online today, the increasing demand for domain name registrations, and the way we have positioned .xyz all validate this projection. Soon we will see that there is only one competitor to .com, and that is .xyz.

Averaged out over a year, a million registrations is over 2,700 per day, a rate that no other new gTLD registry has managed to sustain to date.
If .xyz follows the path taken by its predecessors, it will probably rack up a thousand or so more names per day for the next few days, likely making it a top-ten new gTLD within a week, before settling down to a comfortable rate of 200 to 300 per day.
So far, .guru (four months old) and .club (one month old) are the only gTLDs with significant volumes that have managed to double their launch-day figures.
.xyz is going to be in desperate need of some more marketing if its wants to get to one million by June 2, 2015.
As I’ve always said, I think .xyz is a tough sell.
As Negari says, the string has “little-to-no meaning”, and the game has always been to brand .xyz as being even more generic than .com.
The registry has attempted to shoehorn it into meanings such as “It is the ending of the alphabet, and it is the ending of domain names” and “Generations X, Y and Z”.
But it seems to be one of those sales pitches you either get or you don’t. I’ve heard it many times, and I still don’t.
So 15,000 names in half a day, by my expectations, is not bad.
However, despite the 15,000 names, we’re talking about a TLD with a sub-.com registry fee, being retailed by some registrars for under $10.
With a million names, that’s a nice little business. Sub-100,000, not so much.
There are plenty of people out there who will immediately say the “success” of new gTLDs in general is a combination of many factors, of which volume is only one, and I agree.
It’s only day one for .xyz, but for a cheap-as-chips gTLD that has explicitly made itself a volume play, I think registration count is a fair way to measure its success going forward.
UPDATE: According to Gavin Brown, CTO of .xyz back-end CentralNic, the number of names in the zone file almost 24 hours after GA began is actually 31,119, over double what the registry sold in the first 10 hours.

3 Comments Tagged: .xyz, general availability, new gTLDs

RADAR to be down at least two weeks after hack

ICANN expects its RADAR registrar database to be offline for “at least two weeks” following the discovery of a security vulnerability that exposed users’ login names and encrypted passwords.
ICANN seems to have been quick to act and to disclose the hack.
The attack happened last weekend and ICANN was informed about it by an “internet user” on Tuesday May 27, according to an ICANN spokesperson. RADAR was taken offline and the problem disclosed late May 28.
The spokesperson added that “we do not believe the user is affiliated with a current or previously accredited registrar.”
ICANN isn’t disclosing the nature of the vulnerability, but said RADAR will be offline for some time for a security audit. The spokesperson told DI in an email:

It will be at least two weeks. It is more important to complete a thorough security assessment of the site than to rush this process. First of all, we’re keeping the system offline until we complete a thorough audit of the system. We are also currently engaged in a security review of all systems and procedures at ICANN to assess and implement ongoing improvements as appropriate.

RADAR is a database used by registrars to coordinate stuff like emergency contacts and IP address whitelisting for bulk Whois access.
The downtime is not expected to impact registrants, according to ICANN. The spokesperson said: “Nothing that occurred has raised any concerns that registrants could or would be adversely affected.”

7 Comments Tagged: ICANN, radar, security

How much are new gTLDs really costing trademark owners? We have some numbers.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the last six months of new gTLDs, it’s that predictions about massive levels of defensive registrations were way off the mark.
New gTLDs are not seeing anywhere near the same numbers of sales during sunrise periods as their predecessors.
I have managed to collate some data that I think gives a pretty accurate picture of how many sunrise registrations are being made and therefore how much new gTLDs are costing trademark owners.
About 128 gTLDs have finished their sunrise periods to date, and I have the sunrise sales figures for 101 of them. All of these numbers were provided by the respective registry operator.
The biggest sunrise, per these numbers, was for .clothing, which had 675 registrations. That’s 5.97% of the 11,301 overall names in the .clothing zone file today, over three months after launch.
At the other end of the scale is شبكة. (“.shabaka” or “.web” in Arabic), which sold just five names during its sunrise, the first of the program, which was restricted to Arabic trademarks.
The total number of sunrise sales across across all 101 gTLDs is 14,567, making for an average of 144.2 domains per new gTLD sunrise.
Sunrise currently accounts for 1.87% of all names in these 101 gTLDs, but that’s an artificially high number because some of the gTLDs I have sunrise numbers for are not yet in general availability.
But compare the real numbers to .co, which sold over 11,000 names at sunrise when it launched in summer 2010, or .xxx, which took 80,000 sunrise applications in late 2011.
Trademark owners are not defensively registering with anywhere near the same fervor as they once did.
If that 144.2 average names holds true for all 128 gTLDs that have completed sunrise, we can approximate that 18,461 names have been sold during sunrise periods to date.
I should point out that I’m assuming in these calculations that all sunrise registrations are “defensive” and that brand owners are not defensively registering during general availability.
Neither of those assumptions will be fully true.
Not all sunrise sales are made to genuine brand owners, of course. Some number of generic dictionary domains have been registered by people who obtained trademarks just in order to get the matching domain.
And only a psychic could know whether a GA registration is “defensive” or not at this stage.
But let’s assume that every sunrise reg went to a genuine brand owner. How much have they had to pay for these names?
It’s difficult to calculate a precise dollar value because each registry has a different pricing scheme and sometimes the price of a name can vary even within a specific given TLD.
I looked to the prices listed at 101domain, which has pretty exhaustive coverage of new gTLDs, for a guide.
The average first-year cost for a sunrise registration in the 75 or so new gTLDs currently being sold to trademark owners at 101domain is a little shy of $165.
Assuming that’s a good guide for pricing in sunrise periods that have already closed, we can calculate that 18,461 names at $165 a pop equals $3,046,089 out of the pockets of trademark owners in the first year.
But the sunrise fees are not the only costs, of course. In order to participate in a sunrise you must first register your mark in the Trademark Clearinghouse.
There are 30,251 marks registered in the TMCH, according to the TMCH itself. At $150 a pop — the minimum you can pay for a TMCH registration — that’s $4,537,650 spent on defensive measures.
Add in the cost of the sunrise registrations and a generous $100,000 to cover the cost of the 50 Uniform Rapid Suspension cases that have been filed to date and the total cost to brand owners so far over the first 128 new gTLDs comes to $7,683,739.
Whether this is “a lot” or not probably depends on your perspective.
It’s certainly not the billions of dollars that were being predicted by some as recently as last year.
In September the Better Business Bureau and the Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse speculated that 600 “open” new gTLDs could lead to $10 billion being spent on defensive registrations.
That statement was made in a press release calling for stronger cybersquatting legislation in the US.
But if 101 open gTLDs leads to $3,046,089 being spent, 600 such gTLDs should lead to a total cost of about $18 million, not including the fixed TMCH costs (which probably won’t grow very fast in future).
That’s not the same ballpark, not the same league, not even the same sport.

15 Comments Tagged: cybersquatting, defensive, new gTLDs, sunrise, trademarks

ICANN registrar database hacked

ICANN’s database of registrar contact information has been hacked and user data has been stolen.
The organization announced this morning that the database, known as RADAR, has been taken offline while ICANN conducts a “thorough review” of its security.
ICANN said:

This action was taken as a precautionary measure after it was learned that an unauthorized party viewed data in the system. ICANN has found no evidence of any unauthorized changes to the data in the system. Although the vulnerability has been corrected, RADAR will remain offline until a thorough review of the system is completed.

Users of the system — all registrars — have had their usernames, email addresses and encrypted passwords compromised, ICANN added.
ICANN noted that it’s possible to brute-force a hashed password into plaintext, so it’s enforcing a password reset on all users, but it has no evidence of any user accounts being accessed.
RADAR users may want to think about whether they have the same username/password combinations at other sites.
RADAR is a database used by registrars in critical functions such as domain name transfers.
Registrars can use it, for example, to white-list the IP addresses of rival registrars, enabling them to execute large amounts of Whois queries that would usually be throttled.
The news follows hot on the heels of a screwup in the Centralized Zone Data Service, which enabled any new gTLD registry to view data belonging to rival registries and other CZDS users.

4 Comments Tagged: glitch, ICANN, radar, security

Sex.xxx sells for $3m as PussyCash cites SEO value

ICM Registry has sold a package of 40 premium .xxx domain names with a total value of $5 million to Barron Innovations, operator of the PussyCash porn affiliate network.
The headline sale in the batch is sex.xxx, which carried a standalone $3 million price tag.
That’s the first .xxx name to sell for a seven-figure sum. The previous record for a single name was $500,000 for gay.xxx.
It’s also the highest-priced non-.com domain name ever sold, according to publicly available sale prices.
It beats shopping.de, which went for the euro equivalent of $2.85 million in 2008, making sex.xxx the 10th most-expensive domain we know about.
Sex.com is of course the highest priced domain ever sold, going for $13 million in 2010.
According to ICM, Barron bought cam.xxx, phone.xxx and black.xxx for undisclosed six-figure prices. The deal also included web.xxx, market.xxx, mate.xxx and education.xxx, the company said.
Barron is evidently affiliated with webcam-oriented porn sites ImLive.com and Webcamwiz.com, as well as the related lead-generation program PussyCash.com.
PussyCash was subject to this glowing review (NSFW) in the adult industry press recently and is apparently a bit of a big deal in that world.
ICM tells me Barron had been studying the search engine optimization performance of .xxx for some time before signing the deal. Shay Efron, spokesperson for the buyer, said in a press release:

We have studied the undeniably superior performance of .XXX domains in terms of SEO and conversion rates and decided to make a huge splash by acquiring the very best keyword generic names available. We evaluated SEX.xxx, the flagship domain, and decided it has the potential to became the leading brand in the entire adult industry, so it was an obvious part of a very large deal.

The company intends to develop the names, according to a press release.
This is pretty good news for ICM (because of the cash) but it’s also promising for new gTLDs as a whole.
I’m not privy to Barron’s research, but if it’s confident enough in the SEO benefits of .xxx to spend $3 million on one name, that might be a signal that other niche gTLDs could see the same benefits in future.
It might not happen overnight — ICM launched .xxx two and a half years ago — but premium names could appreciate in value, assuming new registries manage to get some actual users building sites.

9 Comments Tagged: barron innovations, icm registry, premium names, pussycash, sex.xxx, xxx

US House passes anti-ICANN bill

The US House of Representatives has passed the DOTCOM Act, which would prevent the Department of Commerce from walking away from its oversight of the DNS root zone.
The bill was approved as an amendment to a defense authorization act, with a 245-177 vote that reportedly saw 17 Democrats vote in line with their Republican opponents.
The DOTCOM Act has nothing whatsoever to do with .com. Rather, it’s a response to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s plan to relinquish its role in root zone management.
The bill as passed (pdf) would prevent NTIA from agreeing to any multistakeholder community-created IANA transition proposal until the Government Accountability Office had issued a study on the proposal.
The GAO would have one year from the point ICANN submits the proposal to come up with this report.
That means that if ICANN and NTIA want to stick to their September 2015 target date for the transition, either the ICANN community would need to produce a proposal at unprecedented and unlikely speed or the GAO would need to take substantially less than a year to write its report.
I don’t think it’s an impossible target, but it’s certainly looking more likely that NTIA will have to exercise one of the two-year automatic renewal options in the current IANA contract.
That’s all assuming that a matching bill passes through the Democrat-controlled Senate and then receives a presidential signature, of course, which is not a certainty.
Assuming a bloc vote by the 47 Republican Senators, only four Democrats (or independents) would need to switch sides in order for the DOTCOM Act to become, barring an unlikely presidential veto, law.
To the best of my knowledge there is not currently a matching bill in the Senate.

6 Comments Tagged: congress, dotcom act, iana, iana transition, ICANN, ntia

.club now biggest-selling new gTLD

.club has overtaken .guru to become the top-selling new gTLD on the market.
According to today’s zone file report, .club now has 59,120 domains, having grown by 2,504 yesterday. That’s compared to .guru, which grew by 181 names to 58,791.
It’s been 12 days since .CLUB Domains predicted it would be at the top of the league table “within days”.
It’s taken 20 days for the gTLD to beat .guru, something the registry at first reckoned would happen within its first week of full general availability.
I don’t think yesterday’s spike has anything to do with the 50 Cent endorsement deal.
As far as I can tell, Fiddy has only been linking to his .com shop on Twitter since his .club domain went live and the deal does not seem to have generated any media coverage outside of domain blogs.
Taking the number one spot is only a relative success, of course. What’s important is that .club is still managing to move 2,500 names in a day three weeks after launch, something no other new gTLD has managed to date.

10 Comments Tagged: .club, .club domains, .guru, donuts, new gTLDs

Fiddy drops da C-bomb at .club launch party

Curtis ’50 Cent’ Jackson accidentally supported “.com” while he was endorsing da new .club gTLD at a launch party at a New York nightclub last night.
As previously reported, Fiddy is da first significant celebrity endorser of a new gTLD. He’s being paid to use 50inda.club, a web site developed by .CLUB Domains, as his new social media hub.
“In Da Club” was of course his breakthrough hit, in 2003.
He showed up at da Tao nightclub in New York — which had been rebranded “.CLUB” for one night only — last night for about 90 minutes in order to meet fans and pose for selfies, etc.
I was there. As disclosure, .CLUB had paid for my airfare from London, a night in a hotel, and copious amounts of alcohol.
I didn’t attempt to get into da roped-off VIP area where Fiddy was being held, but I gather that da bouncers guarding it were somewhat selective in who he got to meet.
He also publicly spoke, alongside .CLUB’s CEO Colin Campbell and CMO Jeff Sass, for about 30 seconds, in order to provide his official endorsement of da new gTLD.
Da problem was that during his brief address he referred to his support for “.com”, which is a little bit like a celebrity being paid to endorse Pepsi referring to how much he loves Coke.
Probably just a Freudian slip. We’ve all done it.
Unfortunately, I can’t give you da full quote just yet. It was quite noisy in there, and I’d consumed quite a bit of Cristal with diamond flakes floating in it. But a lot of people who videoed da address on their phones tell me it will be on YouTube shortly.
Fortunately for .CLUB, I don’t think what he said matters that much.
What matters is how frequently his people link to his new .club domain on his social media channels, how much mainstream media coverage his endorsement generates, and how many people register .club domains as a result.
Getting Fiddy as an anchor tenant will not have come cheap — my guess, and it is just a guess, is that da deal is costing .CLUB high six figures at least — so da company will have to sell a lot of domains to make it pay off.
UPDATE May 26: Here’s .CLUB’s video of da event. Fiddy says he’s very excited to launch his “50 in da .com club”. He later gets it right, referring to “.club” more than once.

15 Comments Tagged: .club, .club domains, 50 cent, new gTLDs

Clinton.democrat sold to some guy in Kansas

Some guy in Kansas registered the domain name clinton.democrat before Rightside’s new gTLD went into general availability today.
It’s one of 38 .democrat domain names in today’s zone file — a mixture of trademark protections registered during the sunrise period and names sold during a three-week landrush.
Judging by the registration date, the name clinton.democrat appears to have been registered during landrush, one of only a small handful currently in the zone file.
The Whois record for the domain lists one Jared Mollenkamp of “Politically Correct Personal Computers” in Topeka, Kansas as the registrant.
While the email address appears to be protected by Whois privacy, a quick Google reveals that a genuine individual by that name lives in Topeka and is involved in PC enthusiast groups.
Quite why he wants clinton.democrat is not clear. There are many reasons the registration could be completely legit.
It seems to be the only personal name of a politician registered prior to .democrat going to general availability.
The Clintons — Bill and now Hillary, who is tipped for a 2016 run at the presidency — are of course one of the most famous Democratic dynasties, probably second only to the Kennedys.
The string “clinton” has been registered in 22 new gTLDs so far, including clinton.center, clinton.watch and clinton.sexy.
Rightside does not have any special mechanism in place to protect the names of politicians, though it has published a policy that prevents registrants using its gTLDs to mock its own employees.
Public figures generally do not have trademark protection for their personal names, and as such have been ripe for cybersquatting and other types of mischief over the years.

2 Comments Tagged: .democrat, clinton.democrat, hillary clinton, landrush, rightside