ICM buys .sex for up to $3 million

ICM Registry, the .xxx domain name registry, may have paid as much as $3 million for the .sex gTLD.
Internet Marketing Solutions Limited, the only other applicant for .sex, withdrew its application this week.
Word is that ICM forked out somewhere between $2 million and $3 million for exclusive rights to the string.
I hear it was a private deal, not an auction organized by a third party.
I wonder whether the price was affected by the revelation by ICANN earlier this month that it considers porn-related gTLD strings “sensitive” for no particular reason.
It’s quite low, considering that sex.com sold for $13 million and sex.xxx sold for $3 million just a couple of months ago.
ICM now is the only applicant for .sex, .porn and .adult. It plans to grandfather existing .xxx registrants into the new namespaces, assuming ICANN doesn’t throw a spanner in the works.

ICM scraps free .xxx porn star offer, starts new one

ICM Registry has partnered with a company called Model Centro to offer free .xxx domain names to porn performers.
Model Centro offers porn models a managed fan site and social networking service. It’s free to the models, with the company taking a 15% slice of whatever subscription fees are taken from their fans.
The arrangement seems to be related to the sale of Models.xxx, which ICM held back as a premium name until this week but which now mirrors the old modelcentro.com.
The deal will see each Models.xxx user get one free .xxx domain.
It also means ICM’s Adult Performer Program, which reserved the names of 3,500 porn stars and allowed them to be claimed for free via Name.com is no more.
The company said in a statement that the two-year-old program has been scrapped.
The new deal is probably better for .xxx. Because Models.xxx is a web site service, each free domain given away is going to turn into a site almost immediately, potentially increasingly the gTLD’s visibility.
The same group that runs Model Centro also recently acquired the premium bukkake.xxx, while another bought extreme.xxx and public.xxx. The three sold for a total of $150,000, according to the registry.

ICANN puts porn gTLDs on hold for no good reason?

In a decision that seems to have come out of nowhere, ICANN has effectively put bids for three porn-themed new gTLDs on hold.
In a June 21 meeting, the board’s New gTLD Program Committee discussed .adult, .sex and .porn, calling them “sensitive strings”.
While it passed no resolution, I understand that ICANN legal staff is delaying the signing of contracts for at least one of these gTLDs while the NGPC carries out its talks.
It’s a surprising development, given that the three strings are not subject to any Governmental Advisory Committee advice, are not “Community” applications, and have not been formally objected to by anyone.
The report from the NGPC meeting acknowledges the lack of a GAC basis for giving the strings special treatment (emphasis added):

The Committee engaged in a discussion concerning applications for several adult-oriented strings in the current round of the New gTLD Program, including .ADULT, .PORN, and .SEX. The applications propose to serve the same sector as the .XXX sponsored TLD. Staff noted that the applications were not the subject of GAC advice, or any special safeguards, other the safeguards that are applicable to all new gTLDs. The Committee considered how the safeguards in the new gTLD Program compare to the safeguards that were included in the .XXX Registry Agreement. The Committee requested staff prepare additional briefing materials, and agreed to discuss the matter further at a subsequent meeting.

This begs the question: why is ICANN giving .porn et al special treatment?
What’s the basis for suggesting that these three strings should be subject to the same safeguards that were applied to .xxx, which was approved under the 2003 sponsored gTLD round?
.porn, .sex and .adult were were applied for under the 2012 new gTLD program, which has an expectation of predictability and uniformity of treatment as one of its founding principles.
Who decided that .sex is “sensitive” while .sexy is not? On what basis?
Is it because, as the NGPC report suggests, that the three proposed gTLDs “serve the same sector” as .xxx?
That wouldn’t make any sense either.
Doesn’t .vacations, a contracted 2012-round gTLD, serve the same sector as .travel, a 2003-round sponsored gTLD? Why wasn’t .vacations subject to additional oversight?
Is it rather the case that the NGPC is concerned that ICM Registry, operator of .xxx, has applied for these three porn strings and proposes to grandfather existing .xxx registrants?
That also wouldn’t make any sense.
.sex has also been applied for by Internet Marketing Solutions, a company with no connection to .xxx or to the 2003 sponsored gTLD round. Why should this company’s application be subject to additional oversight?
And why didn’t .career, which “serves the same sector” as the sponsored-round gTLD .jobs and was applied for by the same guys who run .jobs, get this additional scrutiny before it signed its contract?
It all looks worryingly arbitrary to me.

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.

.xxx sales spike 1,000% during discount

ICM Registry saw an over 1,000% spike in .xxx domain name registrations in May, during which it offered new registrations at a steep discount over its regular price.
The numbers were still relatively small. The registry saw 13,136 adds during the period, compared to 1,131 in April and 1,836 in May 2012, according to ICANN reports published today.
Average add-years rose sequentially from 1.34 to 1.88 (compared to a gTLD industry average of 1.23), according to TLD Health Check, with total add-years up over 1,500% to 24,663.

For the whole of May, ICM offered .xxx domains — which usually carry a registry fee of $62 — for the same price as .com domains. The promotion applied to any length of registration, from one to 10 years.
There were 747 10-year registrations in May. A small number, but exactly 100 more than ICM saw during its first month of general availability in December 2011. There were similar numbers of three and five-year sales, and over 1,100 two-year registrations.
The company ended the month with 120,409 domains under management.

ICM price cut sees 10 times more .xxx sales

ICM Registry saw 13,348 newly added .xxx domain name registrations in May, a period during which it and its registrars were offering the names at .com prices.
That’s more than 10 times the volume it shifted in January, the last month for which official numbers are available.
ICM dropped the registry fee for .xxx from $62 to $7.85 for the whole month, ostensibly (though not actually, I suspect) as part of its antitrust settlement with PornTube owner Manwin Licensing.
Registrants could register names for periods of up to 10 years at the promotional pricing, and registrants appear to have taken advantage.
The number of add-years for May was 25,733, according to ICM, an average of 1.9 years per name. That’s compared to its January rate of 1.37, when the .com average, for comparison, was 1.24.
About a quarter of the newly added names had been previously registered at full price and later allowed to drop.
The .xxx namespace now holds over 122,000 domains, still off its December 2012 peak of 142,000, according to the company.

Porn.com owner buys porn.xxx

PimpRoll, a pornography publisher and owner of porn.com, has bought the domain name porn.xxx from registry manager ICM Registry, it has just been announced.
The domain is already live. The site appears to be distinct from porn.com, but PimpRoll said it plans to build another “tube” site there.
The price of the domain was not disclosed, but PimpRoll is known to have paid $9.5 million for its .com address.
I’d guess we’re talking about low six figures for the .xxx, which was reserved by ICM as a “premium” name.
ICM said in a press release that the buyer will also automatically qualify for porn.sex, porn.porn and porn.adult under ICM’s Grandfathering Program, should it be awarded those gTLDs by ICANN.

ICM sees 20-fold increase in registrations after sharp price drop

ICM Registry says its rate of domain registrations increased 20-fold during the first day .xxx has been on sale at .com prices.
The company took 1,000 registrations at the new $7.85-a-year registry fee since it revealed the price drop yesterday.
While that’s not an earth-shattering number, .xxx’s average daily take is 40 to 50 names, according to ICM CEO Stuart Lawley. The company had roughly 110,000 names under management before the offer started.
Some registrars have only started pushing the names today, he said. Retail prices are roughly the same as those for .com, with Go Daddy, for example, currently selling .xxx for $14.95 a year.
The reduced fee only applies for the month of May, but registrants can lock in prices for up to 10 years.
According to Lawley, domains registered in the last 24 hours were almost exclusively either for one year or 10 years, with an average of 2.3 years.
Almost half (48%) of the new names had been previously registered but allowed to expire over the last few months, he said.
Examples include valentine.xxx, students.xxx, hdmovies.xxx and plenty of others with somewhat more NSFW keywords. ICM actually maintains its own list of dropped porn-related keyword domains here.
One customer yesterday registered .xxx for the new retail price that would have cost him $88,000 on the secondary market for the equivalent .com, Lawley said.

ICM’s claims against Manwin thrown out of court

ICM Registry has suffered a blow in its ongoing lawsuit with porn merchant Manwin Licensing, with a judge this week dismissing all of the registry’s counterclaims against the YouPorn owner.
ICM was sued by Manwin on antitrust grounds in late 2011, but returned fire last October with is own set of allegations, which also included claims that Manwin’s boycott of .xxx was anti-competitive.
But the judge in the case, Philip Gutierrez, on Tuesday granted Manwin’s motion to dismiss all of ICM’s claims.
Gutierrez ruled that ICM had failed to argue it had standing to complain under competition law, stating: “Harm to ICM only is not sufficient to constitute antitrust injury. It must allege harm to the competitive process.”
He also granted Manwin’s motion to strike ICM’s claims under California’s anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) laws, which are designed to protect free speech.
The judge decided that Manwin’s boycott of .xxx was protected under the anti-SLAPP statute.
ICM is now entitled to re-draft and re-submit its counterclaims; if it does not do so it will have to pay Manwin’s legal fees in connection with the anti-SLAPP action, Gutierrez ruled.
“The judge has granted us 30 days to amend our counterclaims. We are exploring all options open to us,” ICM CEO Stuart Lawley said.
Manwin’s owner, Fabian Thylmann, was arrested in Brussels last December and extradited to Germany to face charges of tax evasion.

IFFOR targets new gTLDs with policy service

The International Foundation For Online Responsibility, which sets policy for .xxx, wants to broaden its scope and is to launch a “Policy Engine” service for new gTLD registries.
Kieren McCarthy, who has been working for IFFOR as its public participation manager for the last year, has been tapped to lead the organization too, taking over from Joan Irvine as executive director in April.
IFFOR is the sponsoring organization for .xxx, independent but created by registry manager ICM Registry as a way to demonstrate to ICANN that it planned to operate the porn gTLD responsibly.
It’s kept a bit of a low profile since .xxx launched, only emerging to distribute some small grants to worthy causes, but McCarthy says that it’s built up substantial policy-making and compliance expertise.
Now, it wants to let new gTLD registries outsource these functions to it.
“Broadly, the Policy Engine service lets gTLD applicants outsource their policy issues to an independent body,” McCarthy said.
IFFOR reckons plenty of new gTLDs will want such services, especially given the increased interest from governments in how new gTLDs are operated.
As the organization is currently set up to deal only with .xxx — it’s funded $10 a year from every .xxx sold — only three of its nine-member Policy Council are not members of the adult entertainment industry or connected to ICM.
Additionally, ICM’s general counsel is on its three-member board of directors.
But McCarthy said that the Policy Council, which also has substantial expertise in privacy, child protection and free speech issues, usually uses sub-groups to come up with its policies.
“The majority of what we do is applicable across any top-level domain,” he said.
McCarthy is the former journalist and ICANN staffer, current CEO of .nxt. When he takes over from Irvine in April, she is expected to stay around as a consultant.