Donuts wins three new gTLD auctions

Donuts has added .lawyer, .fish and .discount to its portfolio of new gTLDs, having won private auctions against its competitors for the strings this week.
It beat Top Level Domain Holdings for .lawyer and WhatBox for .fish and .discount, according to a blog post from Innovative Auctions, which managed the auction.
The winning bids were, as usual, not disclosed. The losing bidders receive most of the cash the winning bidder was willing to pay.
The three auctions were part of a surprisingly small batch that included .website, where Radix beat TLDH yesterday. Innovative says it has settled 18 contention sets to date.
The gTLD strings .discount and .lawyer are still subject to Governmental Advisory Committee “Category 1” advice, meaning the GAC wants them to be regulated for consumer protection reasons.

TLDH has the end in sight, but no revenue

Top Level Domain Holdings made less than $12,000 in the first half of the year, but says its new gTLD business may start generating revenue in the fourth quarter.
In its interim financial results, published this morning, the company also revealed that it plans to launch its own domain name registrar and, via a partnership, web site building tools.
Revenue for the six months to June 30, which was almost all due to monetization of its second-level domains portfolio, was £7,000 ($11,295), compared to £346,000 ($558,000) a year earlier.
TLDH’s loss for the period grew to £1.8 million ($2.9 million) from £1.5 million ($2.4 million).
But in a lengthy statement chairman Fred Krueger assured investors that he is “confident” that the long process of getting TLDH’s applied-for gTLDs to market is drawing to a close.

Looking forward, I am confident that ICANN will broadly continue to sign contracts in line with the timelines we announced in July 2013, allowing .LONDON potentially to begin its launch and initial marketing as early as the first half of 2014. Given the recent signing of contract between .KIWI and ICANN, we may see our first revenues as a back-end registry operator as early as Q4 2013, and revenue from the sale of domain names from our first wholly-owned new gTLD by Q1 2014.

The company currently has interests in 25 uncontested gTLDs and has applied for 48 more, according to Krueger.
With more private and ICANN new gTLD auctions coming soon, TLDH has cash on hand of £7.4 million ($12 million).
Given the average selling price of a new gTLD is currently $1.3 million, there’s seems to be little chance of TLDH securing its entire portfolio of applied-for strings without additional funding.
Losing private auctions could be a way to generate cash to win more than the nine auctions that its $12 million implies, however.
Krueger also revealed TLDH’s revenue plans beyond its Minds + Machines registry services business.

As we enter into this final phase, we are pursuing other potential revenue-producing ventures by developing our own registrar, and, in cooperation with the website-building company Needly, providing a clean path for users to get a complete online solution – a web presence and email, as well as a domain name.

Krueger is also CEO of Needly, which makes a web content management platform.

One IE pass, one fail this week

ICANN is down to 18 new gTLD applications in Initial Evaluation now, after one pass and one failure this week.
The pass is the dot-brand .lplfinancial, applied for by LPL Financial, a US-based broker. The company already owns the arguably better domain lpl.com.
The failure, which is eligible for Extended Evaluation, is Top Level Domain Holdings’ geographic bid for .roma, a city TLD for Rome, Italy.
The application failed on geographic grounds, meaning TLDH seems to have failed to provide sufficient evidence of government support or non-objection.
It’s TLDH’s final IE result and the only one of its 70 applications to fail to achieve a passing score.

TLDH commits to four private gTLD auctions

Top Level Domain Holdings has committed four of its applied-for gTLDs to private auctions due to kick off tomorrow.
The four strings are .guide, .casa, .网址 (“web address” in Chinese) and .fishing, each of which has only one competing applicant.
The company will bid against Donuts on .casa and .guide, Demand Media on .fishing and Hu Yi Global Information Resources on .网址.
Results of the auctions, managed by Innovative Auctions, are expected to be announced next week.
TLDH was initially cautious about the idea of private auctions, but later decided to participate, for reasons CEO Antony Van Couvering explained in this June article.
Over 100 strings, including 68 from Donuts, are expected to be hitting the block with Innovative this week. The first six strings to be auctioned this way raised an average of $1.5 million per string.
TLDH has 49 strings in active contention.

Tucows and TLDH buddy up on three gTLD auctions

Top Level Domain Holdings and Tucows have made a complex deal on new gTLD applications for .store, .tech and .group.
The partnership will see TLDH take a majority stake in .group, which it hasn’t also applied for, while Tucows will take minority interests in .tech and .store, which it in turn has not also applied for.
All three strings are heading to auction, with four applicants for .group, five for .tech, and six for .store.
How much each company owns of each registry will depend on how much they contribute to a winning auction bid.
TLDH CEO Antony Van Couvering said in a press release:

By combining our financial resources on these three domains not only are our chances of success improved in the auction round, but TLDH has the opportunity to acquire an interest in an additional top-level domain, .GROUP.

Tucows already plans to use TLDH subsidiary Minds + Machines as the registry back-end for the five new gTLDs it has applied for.

90 new gTLDs pass IE. Two more withdrawals

ICANN has published its weekly run-down of new gTLD Initial Evaluation results and this week 90 applications have passed.
There have also been two withdrawals, both made by Uniregistry. It’s withdrawn its bids for .media and .country, leaving Tucows and Donuts duking it out for .media and Top Level Domain Holdings as the sole remaining applicant for .country.
TLDH and Uniregistry previously inked a deal that would see them go 50:50 on .country, the only question remaining was which applicant would drop out.
These are this week’s passing applications:

.ecom .doctor .cpa .forum .aco .mba .mom .sbs .frogans .rip .changiairport .tirol .homesense .swatch .hotel .ice .realty .web .fun .clubmed .ril .creditcard .datsun .netbank .jmp .ferrero .hockey .contact .avianca .gold .beauty .audi .cheap .bet .uconnect .map .cooking .pics .network .madrid .garden .zone .expert .cfa .trv .review .forum .pizza .dabur .pay .app .bingo .home .ryukyu .agency .tdk .xfinity .nokia .raid .hoteles .tube .school .win .gmbh .faith .show .radio .pizza .wtf .juniper .xerox .rehab .global .cloud .docs .life .fun .brother .intel .place .photo .christmas .wine .dupont .run .home .ping .boutique .mortgage .store

TLDH and Famous Four ink new gTLD revenue sharing deal

New gTLD portfolio applicants Top Level Domain Holdings and Famous Four Media did in fact make a deal to resolve three contention sets, as suspected.
TLDH has just confirmed that it withdrew its applications for .science and .review in exchange for Famous Four withdrawing its application for .fit.
But the deal also includes a revenue-sharing component — TLDH will get a cut of whatever revenue Famous Four makes selling .review domain names after it goes live.
All three of the gTLDs in question were in two-way contention sets between the two companies, as we reported yesterday.
TLDH gave the following update:

TLDH now has interests in 23 uncontested applications, including 15 wholly/majority owned applications, 6 where it is acting as the registry service provider for client applications, 1 equal joint venture, and 1 where it will receive a minority revenue share. Of the remaining 63 applications which TLDH either wholly-owns, is a joint-venture partner, or is acting as the registry service provider, 7 are in contention with a single other applicant, 17 with two other applicants and 39 are in contention with three or more applicants.

While the dollar amounts concerned were not disclosed, I can’t help but feel TLDH got a good deal with .review.
For the cost of an ICANN application fee*, much of which was recouped in refunds, it seems to be getting an ongoing revenue stream with no ongoing costs and little future risk.
* Of course, in TLDH’s case it has also been burning cash for the best part of five years waiting for new gTLDs to come to life, but you get the point.

Famous Four wins two new gTLD contention sets

Four new gTLD applications were withdrawn overnight, resolving three contention sets.
Top Level Domain holdings has pulled its bids for .review and .science, in both cases leaving subsidiaries of portfolio applicant Famous Four Media as the only remaining applicant.
Meanwhile, Famous Four withdrew its .fit application, leaving TLDH as the only remaining applicant.
Buyouts? It seems possible. The .review application passed its Initial Evaluation a month ago, so the ICANN refund due to TLDH will have been dramatically reduced.
As a publicly traded company, TLDH is likely to issue a statement at some point explaining the current state of its applications.
But one of the side effects of ICANN’s preference for private deals is that we won’t always know when two or more companies privately resolve their contention sets.
There are at least two other contention sets where I have very good reasons to believe that deals have already been done, partially resolving the set, but nothing has yet been disclosed.
Also overnight, L’Oreal’s application for .garnier, a dot-brand, was withdrawn. It’s the fifth, and probably not the last, of L’Oreal’s 14 original new gTLD application to be dropped.
Governmental Advisory Committee advice has been leveled against .fit and .review, but not .science.
UPDATE: The original version of this story erroneously reported that TLDH, rather than Famous Four, had withdrawn its .fit application. This has now been corrected. Apologies for the error.

TLDH bags $10m in share sale

Top Level Domain Holdings has raised roughly $10 million by selling shares to institutional investors and directors.
The company, listed on the Alternative Investment Market in London, said today it has placed 110,375,276 new ordinary shares at £0.06 apiece.
The money will be used to help the company win some new gTLD contention set auctions and to promote the uncontested geo .london, which TLDH has been hired to manage.
The company is involved in 88 new gTLDs, some as applicant and some as back-end registry provider via its Minds + Machines subsidiary.
TLDH said it expects to start launching TLDs in the fourth quarter.

Donuts puts 63 new gTLDs to private auction, but at least 17 are dead on arrival

Donuts has committed 63 of its 307 new gTLD applications to a private auction next month, but at least 17 of them are doomed already because rival Uniregistry won’t take part.
Donuts, which does not want to enter into joint ventures with competing gTLD applicants, has decided to use a private auction managed by Cramton Associates instead of an ICANN auction.
The first round of auctions are due to kick off June 3, but Cramton has set a deadline of next week for applicants to commit the strings they want to bid on.
Donuts has put forward these ones (note that they’re different to those reported elsewhere earlier due to a couple of typos in the original press release):

.apartments, .auction, .audio, .baseball, .boats, .cafe, .church, .college, .construction, .direct, .discount, .fish, .football, .forsale, .furniture, .fyi, .global, .gratis, .guide, .juegos, .jewelry, .legal, .living, .luxury, .phone, .photography, .plus, .red, .run, .storage, .theater, .trading, .vote, .beauty, .broadway, .city, .club, .forum, .garden, .help, .hosting, .hot, .marketing, .media, .memorial, .wedding, .chat, .online, .pizza, .sale, .salon, .school, .search, .show, .soccer, .team, .group, .site, .style, .law, .store, .blog, and .art.

Running the list through the DI PRO database, we quickly discover that 33 of these strings are in two-horse races, 13 have three applicants, nine have four and three have five.
The remaining four contention sets have six, seven, nine and 10 applicants respectively.
Uniregistry, the portfolio applicant run by domainer Frank Schilling, is involved in 17 of the contention sets, and Schilling confirmed to DI today that the company does not intend to participate.
As we’ve previously reported, Uniregistry says it has concerns that private auctions may be illegal under US antitrust law, though substantial doubt has been cast over that assertion since.
Because all applicants in a contention set need to commit for the auction to be meaningful, we can assume that at least 17 of Donuts’ proposed auctions will not go ahead, unless Uniregistry changes its mind.
Top Level Domain Holdings has applied for 13 of the strings Donuts wants to take to auction. TLDH has also expressed concern in the past about the private auction concept.
Directi, Famous Four Media and Google are each involved in eight of the contention sets, while Amazon is involved in five.
According to Cramton, each auction will take place in bidding rounds, with the first round having a maximum bid of $50,000 multiplied by the number of applicants and subsequent rounds increasing that by 10% multiplied by the number of bidders.
If any applicant in a given auction requests privacy, then the winning amount will not be disclosed.