woke.com among domains in NamesCon auction

Right Of The Dot has published the list of domains it hopes to help auction off during the forthcoming NamesCon 2023 conference in Texas, and my highlight has to be woke.com.

ROTD said in a press release that the headline lots of the auction, which seems to have 451 listed domains, are:

qd.com, oi.com, gorilla.com, holiday.com, programming.com, successful.com, estates.com, woke.com, fighting.com, dancing.com, cryptopunks.com, gpt.info, whois.io, software.ai, robots.ai, god.eth, nftx.com, shiba.com, we.co.uk, hi.co.uk, house.net, rap.hipHop, electricmotorcycles.com, and blackberries.com.

While woke.com is certainly not the domain with the best monetization/development potential, it catches the eye due to the fantastically divisive nature of the word itself, which is coming to dominate culture-wars political bullshit in the English-speaking world.

While “woke” ideology is arguably simply a modern restatement of the Golden Rule, it can mean very different things to different people — at one extreme it means welcoming the reintroduction of racial segregation and getting people fired for wearing a hat, and at the other it means buying a closet full of AR-15s because drag queens are coming to cut off your son’s penis.

The algorithm at the parking page it currently points to thinks it relates to beds.

It’s going to be fascinating to see who, if anyone, buys it, and what they do with it. It’s listed with a starting bid north of $250,000.

qd.com and estates.com both have starting bids above $1.5 million, while oi.com starts at over $1 million.

The auction runs online at rotd.com and live at NamesCon for the next three weeks.

Stop me if you’ve heard this…

The collective noun for wildebeest is “an implausibility”.

In the incredibly unlikely event that you’re ever confronted by a large group of these majestic bovine quadrupeds, that’s how you should describe what you see.

An implausibility of wildebeest.

I tell you this not because it’s relevant to anything else that appears in this article, but because a series of unfortunate and unavoidable circumstances have kept me offline for the last few weeks, and you may find this round-up piece tells you lots of things you already know.

If that’s the case for you, I can only apologize, with the caveat that you probably didn’t know about the wildebeest thing, so at least this post has provided some value.

Let’s start with ICANN, shall we?

My ICANN announcements feed contains 20 unread articles this morning, and as far as I can tell from a cursory glance over the headlines, the Org has done almost nothing of consequence recently.

It’s mostly outreach-this, engagement-that, review-the-other. If official announcements were any guide, ICANN would look like an entity far more concerned with promoting and promulgating its own increasingly debatable legitimacy, rather than doing the stuff it was originally set up to do.

Like new gTLDs, for example…

While ICANN continues to fart around with its working groups and consultations and Dantean layers of bureaucracy, the blockchain/crypto/web3 crowd are continuing to bolster their efforts to eat the Org’s breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Most notably, blockchain-based alt-root naming services including Unstoppable have launched the Web3 Domain Alliance, which, even if it misses its goals, promises to make the next new gTLD round an even bigger litigation clusterfunge than the last.

The alliance intends to among other things “advocate for the policy position that NFT domain registry owner-operators create trademark rights in their web3 TLDs through first commercial use with market penetration.”

In other words, if some well-financed crypto bro creates .example on some obscure blockchain root and gets a little bit of traction, ICANN shouldn’t be allowed to create .example on the authoritative consensus root.

This has the potential to make Jarndyce and Jarndyce look like a parking ticket hearing and I take some comfort from the fact that I’ll most likely be long dead before the lawsuits from the next new gTLD round have all played out.

The Web3 Domain Alliance is promising imminent pledges of support from “web2” companies, and it will be interesting to see if any company in the conventional domain name industry is ready to break ranks with ICANN and sign up.

In actual gTLDs…

Another thing that will likely post-date my death is the launch of the last gTLD from the 2012 application round. Many still lie dormant, but they do still continue to trickle out of the gates.

While I’ve been offline, we’ve witnessed the general availability launch of Google’s .boo and .rsvp — the former criminally missing the increasingly lengthy and bewildering Halloween season and the latter probably a little late for the Christmas party season — while non-profit .kids went GA a couple of days ago.

In the world of ccTLDs…

GoDaddy is formally relaunching .tv, the rights to operate it won in a bidding process earlier this year after incumbent registry Verisign declined to compete.

It’s talking about a “a complete rebrand and marketing makeover”, with a new, very colorful, destination site at TurnOn.tv.

Many years ago, a senior Verisign exec described .tv to me as “better than .com”, and in a world where any shouty teenage pillock can essentially launch their own TV show for the price of an iPhone and broadband connection, that’s probably never been truer.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian ccTLD registry Hostmaster isn’t going to let the little matter of an ongoing Russian invasion interfere with its 30th birthday celebrations and the 12th annual UADOM conference.

It’s being held remotely for obvious reasons. It starts tomorrow, runs for two days, and more details can be found here and here.

In other conference news, NamesCon has also announced dates for its 2023 NamesCon Global conference. According to Domain Name Journal, it will return to Austin, Texas, from May 31 to June 3 next year.

DomainPulse, the conference serving the Germanophone region of Europe (albeit in English), has set its 2023 event for February 6 and 7 in Winterthur, Switzerland.

Scoop of the month…

By far the most interesting article I’ve read from the last month came from NameBio’s Michael Sumner, a reverse-exposé of the successful .xyz domain investor who goes by the name “Swetha”.

This area of the industry is not something I spend a lot of time tracking, but I’ll admit whenever I’ve read about this mononymed India-based domainer’s extensive, expensive .xyz sales, I’ve had a degree of skepticism.

It turns out that skepticism was shared by some fellow industry dinosaurs, so Sumner did the legwork, amazingly and ballsily obtaining Swetha’s Afternic login credentials (with her consent) and hand-verifying years of sales data.

He concluded that the sales she’s been reporting on Twitter are legit, and that she’s a pretty damn good domainer, but understandably could not fully disprove the hypothesis that some of her buyers are .xyz registry shills.

Elliot Silver later got a comment from the registry in which it denied any kind of collusion and implied skepticism was the result of sexism and/or racism, rather than the sketchiness sometimes displayed by anonymous Twitter accounts and the registry itself.

Earnings, M&A, IPOs…

• The otherwise-consolidating industry is getting its first IPO in some time, with United-Internet pitching a public markets spin-off of its IONOS group, which includes brands such as Sedo and InternetX, to potential investors. DNW pulled out some of the more interesting facts from its presentation.
• Industry consolidator CentralNic reported a strong Q3, though its growth is no longer dependent on its domain name business.
• Tucows reported modest growth (pdf) for Q3, hindered by flat-to-down results in its domain name business.
• GoDaddy, which no longer breaks out numbers for its domains business, reported a billion-dollar quarter.
• Smaller, faster-growing registrar NameSilo reported turning a loss into a profit in the quarter.
• In M&A, Namespace, owner of EuroDNS, announced it has acquired fellow German registrar Moving Internet.

And finally…

The DNS turned 35. So that’s nice.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have 600 unread emails to deal with…

Porn names to feature at NamesCon Global

NamesCon, the domaining conference, has revealed that “adult” domain names will be the focus of one its sessions at its next event, hosted by a former dominatrix.

The conference has recruited Monte Cahn of RightOfTheDot (not the former dominatrix) and investor Krista Gable of Domain Domme to run a session on “Adult Domain Names”.

Organizers couldn’t resist a bit of cheeky innuendo in a mailshot this week, promising to help attendees “explore the ins and outs of buying, selling, developing, and monetizing in this unique and valuable namespace.”

Gable told DomainGang in an interview a few years ago that she’s particularly interested in domains at the intersection of sex and technology, and her portfolio today seems to be largely porn-adjacent rather than downright filthy.

Not much else is known about NamesCon’s agenda yet. We do know there’s going to be a literal sausage fest at the end of the week at a local beer garden, an auction, and a “Women In Domaining” session at the end of the third day.

The conference runs in Austin, Texas from August 31 and tickets currently start at $499 before increasing next week.

NamesCon will be virtual again this year, and more expensive

The popular NamesCon conference has scrapped its plan to return to in-person events this year, and will instead host another virtual con in September.

Organizers said today that NamesCon Online 2020 will take place from September 22 to 24, in a return to its in-house online networking platform.

It’s shuffled its pricing scheme since the last event, too.

At the low end, gone are the free passes for new attendees. Instead, the first 150 newbies to sign up will get their pass for $19.

Regular pricing is $99, reduced to $79 for those who register before July 4.

There’s also a new, more expensive tier for members of the sell-side of the industry. Employees of registries, registrars and marketplaces will have to pay $299 for their tickets.

NamesCon is also continuing its partnership with DNAcademy. A domaining course and conference ticket bundle will set you back $499 again.

NamesCon had planned to return to in-person meetings by the middle of 2021 with NamesCon Europe, back when phrases like “variant of concern” and “third wave” were largely hypothetical, but that event was recently cancelled.

NamesCon Europe cancelled — “pandemics suck”

The year’s NamesCon Europe conference has been cancelled.

The organizers said today that the 2021 event, which had been due to take place in Budapest this June, will not go ahead due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic:

Since Hungary still has a high rate of COVID infections and in-person gatherings are not allowed, we cannot produce NamesCon Europe in Budapest in July. Nobody can predict when things will improve and our recent NamesCon survey showed a high reluctance to travel, so planning this intimate in-person gathering didn’t make sense. Pandemics suck.

Unlike ICANN 71, which was last week rescheduled from The Hague to Zoom, NamesCon is not moving to the bespoke online platform it used last year.

Organizers said that they’re not setting a new date yet, but there appears to be the possibility of other online events in future.

Hungary currently ranks 4th-worst in terms of deaths per capita, according to Statista, sandwiched between the UK and Italy, two of the earliest and hardest-hit countries.

It’s currently seeing more daily cases and deaths than the UK in absolute numbers, despite having less than a sixth of the population.

NamesCon Europe founder Dietmar Stefitz reportedly dies

I’m very sorry to report that Dietmar Stefitz, founder of the domainer conference that would become NamesCon Europe, has died, according to social media posts.

His Facebook profile this morning filled with tributes, variously describing him as “passionate”, “kind” and “genuine”, after his niece announced his death.

Stefitz was best known in the domain industry for founding the Domaining Europe conference in 2008, which he hosted annually, typically in his home town of Valencia, Spain, for a decade.

The event was eventually merged with GoDaddy’s NamesCon to become NamesCon Europe in 2018, and Stefitz took a backseat role in its management.

I did not know Dietmar well, but I spent a enjoyable evening at his table during the inaugural NamesCon Europe and found him warm and engaging.

Eerily, Stefitz’s Twitter profile was updated this afternoon, encouraging readers to “take advantage of the little moments”, over 15 hours after his death was announced. I don’t know whether it was a time-delayed post or was posted by a relative.

While the tweeted video prominently features the character of the Grim Reaper, and it’s a Christmas advertisement for meat products, it does carry the message “Disfruta en vida”, which I believe translates as “Enjoy Life”.

Disfruta en vida y la alegría de la Navidad, aprovecha esos pequeños momentos. https://t.co/Qi6JW1YN4b #DisfruteEnVida

— Dietmar Stefitz (@bemarnet) December 4, 2020

It’s a message that, by all accounts, Stefitz lived by.

NamesCon will be back to in-person events next July

The NamesCon conference plans to be back to in-person meetings by July 2021, according to the organizers.

NamesCon said today that there will be three conferences next year. The first will be virtual, the second physical, and the third hybrid.

The first meeting will be from January 27 to January 29 next year. That’s the typical “Global” event. But this time it will be another NamesCon Online, because, well, you know.

NamesCon seems to be optimistic that this coronavirus nonsense will be largely settled by next July, because it’s planning an in-person conference in Budapest, Hungary, for July 14 to July 17 next year.

The third 2021 meeting will somewhere in North America about a year from now. It will be a “hybrid” live/online deal.

Let’s hope this is all possible. Let’s face it, none of us knows.

Here’s what’s in the NamesCon Online schwag bag

NamesCon is fully online-only this year, due to the pandemic, but that hasn’t stopped the organizers sending out schwag bags to paid-up attendees. Mine arrived this morning in an A4 card envelope. Here’s what was inside.

• A totally unnecessary lanyard, sponsored by a web site security company called Sectigo.
• An equally unnecessary face mask, sponsored by a company I’d never heard of before called FlatSite. These guys appear to be in the business of providing a service that simplifies WordPress to be more suitable for managing large numbers of small static sites.
• An “I [heart] Domains” sticker sponsored by domain monetization company Bodis. I guess you’re supposed to slap this to your laptop.
• A larger “YOLO” sticker sponsored by Radix.
• A NamesCon pin/badge/button. Apparently if you post a selfie while wearing it to the NamesCon platform you’re entered into a draw for a $200 Amazon gift card.

NamesCon Online runs for three days from September 9. Prices range from free to newcomers to $399 if you want a year of DNAcademy thrown in. The standard price is $59.

NamesCon Online ticket prices and name change revealed

NamesCon has published the ticket price list for its upcoming virtual conference, and the first hit’s for free.

Standard tickets start at $59 — which includes a schwag bag delivered to your door if you register before the end of July — but the price is expected to go up after the end of August.

NamesCon has also entered into a promo deal with Michael Cyger’s DNAcademy, an educational service for domainers. If you buy a $399 annual subscription, the NamesCon ticket is free.

Finally, there’s a rather generous offer of a free ticket for those who have never attended a NamesCon event before.

Newcomers have to take a short survey, but there doesn’t appear to be any identity verification going on, so it seems to me there’s a possibility of its generosity being abused.

The conference also said last week that it’s changed its name from NamesCon 360° to NamesCon Online, after .online registry Radix became a sponsor. The domain is now namescon.online.

The conference will run 24/7 from September 9 to September 11 in your bedroom.

NamesCon goes virtual with intriguing 24-hour conference concept

NamesCon has announced that it is going to host an online-only conference this year, with sessions running around the clock for three days straight.

It will run from September 9 to September 11 in a “custom online venue” and is being called NamesCon 360°.

Organizers are promising the usual “keynotes, panels, breakout sessions, and partner events” but with intriguing additions such as “intuitive matchmaking” and “gamification”.

The schedule is being split into a daily main track, running from 1500 UTC to 1900 UTC, and regional tracks targeting the Americas and South Asia regions, timed to be more convenient for American and Indian domainers.

There’ll also be 24-hour on-demand content, and sponsor content and networking rooms will be open for the duration of the conference.

It’s early days, and the agenda has not yet been fleshed out with information on specific sessions or speakers.

Registration is not yet open, and there’s no word on pricing. One assumes a lower ticket price than the usual in-person meetings.

NamesCon is promising a demo of its platform soon.