.CLUB HQ trashed by Irma, nobody hurt

.CLUB Domains returned to its new digs in Fort Lauderdale, Florida yesterday to find the building trashed by hurricane Irma.

Fortunately, none of the .club gTLD registry’s 17 employees were hurt during Irma, the category 5 hurricane which lashed Florida over the weekend.

Irma caused at least 10 reported deaths in the state and untold amounts of property damage. Over its full path, close to 50 people have been reported killed.

Chief marketing officer Jeff Sass said that “large parts of the roof had been torn away, exposing our office to devastating wind and rain, pretty much ruining everything”.

“Literally, it looks like a bomb went off. I couldn’t believe the damage. It’s truly a sad day for our company. We feel for everyone affected by this horrible storm and we are very fortunate as all our staff are safe,” CEO Colin Campbell said in a blog post.

Ironically, the building had been scheduled for a refurbishment anyway.

.CLUB plans to use the facility as a tech startup incubator under the brand Startups.club. It had recently been approved for funding by the local Fort Lauderdale government, according to Sass.

None of the company’s registry operations, which are based hundreds of miles north in Virginia, were affected by the damage.

Fellow new gTLD registry MMX is legally based in the thoroughly devastated British Virgin Islands, but has no staff or premises there so was unaffected.

Domain Name Wire is reporting that some registry functions of Anguilla’s .ai ccTLD, also in Irma’s path, were not working in its wake.

Photo: .CLUB Domains

7 Comments Tagged: .club, .club domains, hurricane irma

XYZ slashes $10 million a year from premium stash

XYZ.com has slashed the asking price of a few thousand “premium” .xyz domain names, in some cases by many thousands of dollars.

Overall, it looks like the company has dropped prices by a total of $10.8 million.

At the top end of its reserved list, several single and double-character domains previously priced a $55,000 per year have been reduced to $13,000 per year.

At the lower end, domains previously priced at around $1,300 are now around $300.

Those are the recommended retail prices. Some registrars are offering them with a substantial mark-up.

The reductions affect 2,700 of the domains on XYZ’s premium list, which runs to about 3,075 names in total.

Whereas the previous hypothetical value of the full list was $15.3 million a year, it’s now at $4.4 million a year.

Of course, they’re not worth anything unless somebody is willing to pay the price, and the domains still seem to have end-user price tags on them.

Premium renewal fees have so far proved unpopular in the domain investing community due to the large carrying cost.

XYZ’s full list can be obtained here.

8 Comments Tagged: .xyz, new gTLDs, premium, xyz.com

CentralNic extends XYZ deal until 2032

CentralNic and XYZ.com have extended their registry services pact for the next fifteen years, according to CentralNic.

Announcing its first-half 2017 financial results today, CentralNic said the back-end contract has been extended until 2032.

It’s an unusually long duration for a registry services contract, which are usually much more likely to run about five years.

It even lasts 10 years beyond the expiration of XYZ.com’s own ICANN contracts (though renewal of these is a near-certainty).

The deal covers all .xyz domains, as well as all of the other TLDs in XYZ.com’s portfolio. That currently includes the likes of .rent, .storage and .college.

CentralNic said it “will receive a fixed fee based on the volume of .xyz registrations and subscriptions managed” under the new deal.

In a statement to the markets, CEO Ben Crawford said the relationship “has been updated to normalise the Company’s revenues and profits going forward.”

I believe the previous contract contained a per-domain component, which exposed CentralNic’s revenue to .xyz’s erratic pricing-influenced growth trajectory.

.xyz’s zone file has shrunk by a whopping four million domains since this time last year, causing it to lose the crown of highest-volume new gTLD, due to it offering free or almost free domains that expired without renewing after a year.

However, CentralNic disclosed that the proportion of its own wholesale transaction volumes that were renewals (rather than adds and transfers, I assume) was 18% in the first half, up from 2% in the same 2016 period.

For the six months ended June 30, the company had overall revenue of £10.6 million ($13.9 million), up 18.5% year over year.

Its net loss after tax was £619,000 ($810,000), down from £1.3 million. At the EBITDA level, profit was £1.4 million ($1.8 million) compared to $900,000 in H1 2016.

While I still stubbornly think of CentralNic as primarily a registry play, in fact the company now gets about three quarters of its revenue today from its retail registrar division, which contributed just shy of £8 million to the total in H1.

Instra, the Australian registrar it acquired at the end of 2015, contributed £5.83 million.

The wholesale division, registry back-end services — contributed £1.82 million to revenue and £450,000 to EBITDA in the half.

That’s despite CentralNic being the back-end for six of the top 20 new gTLDs by volume — .website, .space, .tech, .site, .online, and .xyz

If we tally up the number of domains in only those six TLDs, we get to about 4.2 million, per their zone files.

The company’s third reporting unit, Enterprise, contributed £800,000 ($1 million) in the half, of which £360,000 ($471,000) came from premium domain sales.

2 Comments Tagged: .xyz, centralnic, earnings, financials, instra, internet.bs, xyz.com

Pilot program for Whois killer launches

ICANN is to oversee a set of pilot programs for RDAP, the protocol expected to eventually replace Whois.

Registration Data Access Protocol, an IETF standard since 2015, fills the same function as Whois, but it is more structured and enables access control rules.

ICANN said this week that it has launched the pilot in response to a request last month from the Registries Stakeholder Group and Registrars Stakeholder Group. It said on its web site:

The goal of this pilot program is to develop a baseline profile (or profiles) to guide implementation, establish an implementation target date, and develop a plan for the implementation of a production RDAP service.

Participation will be voluntary by registries and registrars. It appears that ICANN is merely coordinating the program, which will see registrars and registrars offer their own individual pilots.

So far, no registries or registrars have notified ICANN of their own pilots, but the program is just a few days old.

It is expected that the pilots will allow registrars and registries to experiment with different types of profiles (how the data is presented) and extensions before ICANN settles on a standard, contractually enforced format.

Under RDAP, ICANN/IANA acts as a “bootstrapping” service, maintaining a list of RDAP servers and making it easier to discover which entity is authoritative for which domain name.

RDAP is basically Whois, but it’s based on HTTP/S and JSON, making it easier to for software to parse and easier to compare records between TLDs and registrars.

It also allows non-Latin scripts to be more easily used, allowing internationalized registration data.

Perhaps most controversially, it is also expected to allow differentiated access control.

This means in future, depending on what policies the ICANN community puts in place, millions of current Whois users could find themselves with access to fewer data elements than they do today.

The ICANN pilot will run until July 31, 2018.

4 Comments Tagged: ICANN, rdap, rrsg, rysg, whois

Hammock swings from Rightside to MarkMonitor

Statton Hammock has joined brand protection registrar MarkMonitor as its new vice president of global policy and industry development.

He was most recently VP of business and legal affairs at Rightside, the portfolio gTLD registry that got acquired by Donuts in July. He spent four years there.

The new gig sounds like a broad brief. In a press release, MarkMonitor said Hammock will oversee “the development and execution of MarkMonitor’s global policy, thought leadership, business development and awareness strategy”.

MarkMonitor nowadays is a business of Clarivate Analytics under president Chris Veator, who started at the company in July.

Comment Tagged: donuts, markmonitor, rightside