Afilias buys the other half of .global

Afilias has acquired one of its new gTLD back-end customers, Dot Global Domain Registry Limited, the registry for .global.
It immediately makes .global Afilias’ best-performing 2012-round new gTLD.
The price of the deal, between two private companies, was undisclosed.
As DI reported last November, Afilias already owned 45% of the company, which had 2017 revenue of $1.9 million and a $320,000 loss.
.global is a relatively good new gTLD business, as new gTLDs go.
We’re looking at a business with probably still low-seven-digit annual revenue, with annual adds and renewals trending upwards.
It had over 48,000 domain under management at the last count, with about about 22,500 annual renews.
The names renew at $100 at GoDaddy, which with 30% of .global regs is the largest .global registrar.
NameCheap, the second-largest registrar (with 11%), renews at about $65.
Anecdotally, it’s a new gTLD that I regularly come across in the wild, which is still relatively noteworthy. It’s often used by multinational companies for global gateway sites.
Afilias said that because .global already runs on its back-end, there won’t be any burdensome migration work for registrars, just some “paperwork will need to be updated”.
In terms of domains under management, .global immediately becomes Afilias’ highest-volume new gTLD (excluding pre-2012 .info, .pro and .mobi).
Its biggest 2012-round TLD, from the about 20 it owns, was .red, with around 34,000 DUM.

Nic.br wins dot-brand from Afilias

Brazilian registry Nic.br has won its sixth gTLD client.
It’s taking on the dot-brand back-end business of Natura, a cosmetics company based in its home town of Sao Paulo.
The .natura gTLD was previously managed by Afilias.
I can’t imagine it’s a hugely valuable deal.
Natura has only a few domains in its zone. It’s using global.natura as a portal to its various national ccTLD sites and app.natura as a gateway to app stores where its mobile app can be obtained.
It’s the latest gTLD to change back-ends in the current wave of new gTLD rejiggering to come about as contracts negotiated during the 2012 application round start to expire.
Nic.br also runs the dot-brands .uol and .globo, the small city TLD .rio, the unlaunched generics .bom (means “good” in Portuguese) and .final, and of course its original ccTLD, .br.

After $30 million deal, is a .voice gTLD now inevitable?

Do big second-level domain sales translate into new gTLD success, and does the record-breaking $30 million sale of voice.com this week make a .voice gTLD inevitable?
The answers, I believe, are no and maybe.
Before the 2012 new gTLD application round, one way applicants picked their strings was by combing through the .com zone file to find frequently-occurring words that terminated the second level string.
This is where we get the likes of .site and .online from Radix and much of Donuts’ portfolio.
But applicants also looked at lists of high-priced secondary market sales for inspiration.
This is where we get the likes of .vodka, from MMX.
The latter strategy has seen mixed-to-poor results.
Five of the top domain sales, as compiled by Domain Name Journal, were not eligible for gTLD status are they are too short.
Of the remaining 15 strings, “sex” (which occurs twice), “fund”, “porn”, “toys” and “vodka” were all applied for in 2012 and are currently on sale.
The strings “clothes” and “diamond” do not appear as gTLDs, but Donuts runs both .clothing and .diamonds.
Not delegated in any fashion are “porno” (unless you count it as a derivative of “porn”), “slots”, “tesla”, “whisky” and “california”. A company called IntercontinentalExchange runs .ice as a dot-brand.
As well as .clothing and .diamonds, .fund and .toys are both also Donuts TLDs. None of them are doing spectacularly well.
At the lower end, .diamonds currently has fewer than 3,000 domain under management, but has a relatively high price compared to the the higher-volume TLDs in Donuts’ stable.
At the high-volume end, .fund has just shy of 16,000 names and .clothing has about 12,000.
Judging by their retail prices, and the fact that Donuts benefits from the economies of scale of a 240-strong TLD portfolio, I’m going to guess these domains are profitable, but not hugely so.
If we turn our attention to .vodka, with its roughly 1,500 domains, it seems clear that MMX is barely covering the cost of its annual ICANN fees. Yet vodka.com sold for $3 million.
So will anyone be tempted to apply for .voice in the next gTLD application round? I’d say it’s very possible.
First, “voice” is a nice enough string. It could apply to telephony services, but also to general publishing platforms that give their customers a “voice”. I’d say it could gather up enough registrations to fit profitably into a large portfolio, but would not break any records in terms of volume.
But perhaps the existence of voice.com buyer Block.one as a possible applicant will raise some other applicants out of the woodwork.
Block.one, which uses a new gTLD and an alt-ccTLD (.io) for its primary web sites, is certainly not out-of-touch when it come to alternative domain names.
Could it apply for .voice, and if it does how much would it be willing to spend to pay off rival applicants? It still apparently has billions of dollars from its internet coin offering in the bank.
How much of that would it be prepared to pay for .voice at private auction?
That prospect alone might be enough to stir the interest of some would-be applicants, but it has to be said that it’s by no means certain that the highly gameable application process ICANN deployed in 2012 is going to look the same next time around.

.gay not coming out this year after all

We won’t be seeing .gay on the internet this year.
Top Level Design has postponed the release of its hard-won gTLD until the second quarter of 2020, having recently said it was planning an October 2019 launch.
The company told registrars yesterday that it wants “to move forward on a timeline that will allow us to create greater impact in a more measured manner”.
The October date was meant to coincide with National Coming Out Day, which I said was “absolutely perfect”.
The 2020 date will instead coincide with one of the Pride events, the registry said.
The story is that Top Level Design wants to spend more time building up support from gay community groups, before it comes to market.
But CEO Ray King denied that it’s facing resistance from groups that supported the rival community-based application from dotgay LLC, which lost the chance to run .gay when it was auctioned.
“It’s really just about having enough time to do a thoughtful launch,” King told DI.
The company recently blogged about one of its .gay marketing brainstorming sessions.

New gTLD registry is latest billion-dollar unicorn

A new gTLD registry that used a different new gTLD for its original web site has merged to form a new company valued at a billion dollars using a new brand in a third new gTLD.
Combell Group announced this week that it has merged with TransIP Group, and that its combined valuation is over $1 billion.
They’re both European hosting companies. Together, they say that have 1.2 million customers and 600 employees.
The newly merged entity is called team.blue — that’s its brand and, using an Afilias-operated gTLD, its new primary domain.
As a privately held company with a billion-dollar valuation, it joins a list of companies called “unicorns”. For some reason.
Combell and TransIP both have domain registrar businesses and play primarily into the Scandinavian and Benelux regions of Europe.
Combell, which has its corporate site at combell.group, owns Danish registrar DanDomain, which was ICANN-accredited with about 20,000 domains under management until it allowed its accreditation to lapse at the start of the year.
TransIP, which was using a .eu domain, is ICANN-accredited, but has no gTLD domains to its name.
Curiously, the two registrars have sequential IANA IDs — 1603 and 1604.
Combell is also the registry for .gent, the new gTLD for the Belgian city of Ghent.

.wang cut off with Chinese red tape

The registry behind .wang and several Chinese-language gTLDs has seen its official registry web site blocked due to Chinese regulations.
Zodiac Registry, which also runs .商城, .八卦 and .网店 (“mail”, “gossip” and “shop”), has seen zodiacregistry.com intercepted by its web host and replaced with a placeholder message explaining that the site lacks the proper government license.

It seems to have happened relatively recently. Google’s cache shows results from the page resolving normally in late May.
Ironically, its host is Alibaba, which also happens to be its largest registrar partner.
There’s no suggestion that registry operations or registrants have been affected. Domain availability checks at registrars for Zodiac TLDs appear to be working as normal.
The downtime appears to be a configuration problem. Alibaba requires customers to submit their Internet Content Provider license number before it will allow their sites to resolve properly.
ICP licenses are part of China’s censorship regime, issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. They must be obtained by any Chinese web site that wants to operate in China.
Zodiac does in fact have such a license, which according to the MIIT web site is active on at least six other domains.
While zodiacregistry.com is the domain officially listed with IANA for the company, it also operates TLD-specific sites such as bagua.wang for the “gossip” registry. None of these have been affected by the licensing issue.
UPDATE June 12: The site is now back online as normal.

Brand kills off gTLD that is actually being USED

Two more companies have told ICANN they’ve changed their minds about running a dot-brand gTLD, including the first example of a TLD that is actually in use.
Dun & Bradstreet has said it no longer wishes to launch .duns, and Australian insurance company iSelect has had enough of .iselect.
Both companies filed to voluntarily terminate their ICANN registry agreements in March, and ICANN published its preliminary decision to allow them to do so this week.
While business data provider D&B never got around to using .duns, .iselect has had dozens of active domains for years.
The company started putting domains in its zone file about three years ago and had over 90 registered names at the last count, with about a dozen indexed by Google. That’s a quite a lot for a dot-brand.
It is using domains such as home.iselect, news.iselect and careers.iselect as redirects to parts of its main corporate site, while domains such as gas.iselect, creditcards.iselect and health.iselect send customers to specific product pages.
They all redirect to its main iselect.com.au site. There are no web sites as far as I can tell that keep visitors in the .iselect realm.
I’m pretty certain this is the first example of a voluntary contract termination by a dot-brand that is actually in active use.
There have been 52 such terminations to date, including these two latest ones, almost all of which have been dot-brands that never got out of the barn door.
That’s over 10% of the dot-brands that were delegated from the 2012 gTLD application round.

New gTLDs slip again in Q1

The number of domains registered in new gTLDs slipped again in the first quarter, but it was not as bad as it could have been.
Verisign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief, out today, reports that new gTLD domains dropped by 800,000 sequentially to end March at a round 23.0 million.
It could have been worse.
New gTLD regs in Q1 were actually up compared to the same period last year, by 2.8 million.
That’s despite the fact that GRS Domains, the old Famous Four portfolio, has lost about three million domains since last August.
Verisign’s own .com was up sequentially by two million domains and at 141 million, up by 7.1 million compared to Q1 2018. But .net’s decline continued. It was down from 14 million in December to 13.8 million in March.
Here’s a chart (click to enlarge) that may help visualize the respective growth of new gTLDs and .com over the last three years. The Y axes are in the millions of domains.

New gTLDs have shrunk sequentially in six of the last 12 quarters, while .com has grown in all but two.
The ccTLD world, despite the woes reported by many European registries, was the strongest growth segment. It was up by 2.5 million sequentially and 10 million compared to a year ago to finish the period with 156.8 million.
But once you factor out .tk, the free TLD that does not delete expired or abusive names, ccTLDs were up by 1.4 million sequentially and 7.8 million on last year.

.icu gets China nod as it tops 900,000 regs

Chinese regulators have approved .icu for sale and use in China, according to the registry.
ShortDot COO Kevin Kopas told DI today that the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has approved its year-old gTLD for mainland use.
The company plans to launch .icu there formally June 12, he said.
Kopas also said that .icu has recently topped 900,000 registrations.
It’s a remarkable growth achievement for a gTLD with barely a year on the clock, given that SpamHaus stats show that its level of spam abuse is still comparable to .com.
But with prices at around $1.50 at its largest registrars and very little semantic value, one has to assume that a lot of its registrations are speculative. Its first junk drop could be brutal.
MIIT approval may help it continue its growth trend. To date, China-based registrars have recorded no .icu sales.

These 27 companies have ditched the .com for their dot-brand

Earlier today, I listed what I believe might be the top 10 dot-brand gTLDs with the most active web sites, but noted that it was probably a rubbish way to gauge the success of the dot-brand concept.
As a follow-up, I thought I’d figure out which brands have taken the bold step of ditching the .com and made their dot-brand their primary web destination.
I found 27 TLDs, which is simultaneously not a lot and easily twice as many as I was expecting.
The most-popular second-level string was “home”, with 12 examples. The string “global” occurs five times on the list.
I did this research manually with Google and a list of 275 dot-brands — anything with Spec 13 in its contract and more than two domains in its zone file — culled from my database.
To get on this list, at least one of the following had to be true:

• The dot-brand was the top hit on Google when searching for the brand in question.
• The .com redirects to the dot-brand.

Sometimes I had to factor out Google’s enormously irritating habit of localizing results, which would prioritize a .uk domain, particularly in the case of automotive brands.
On a few occasions, if I could not be certain whether the “official” primary site was in a ccTLD or the dot-brand, I used the brand’s Wikipedia page as a tie-breaker.
Some entries on the list may be a bit debatable.
I’m not sure whether .barclays should be there, for example. There’s little doubt in my mind that barclays.co.uk is the site that the majority of Barclays’ banking customers use, but barclays.com redirects visitors to home.barclays, so it fits my criteria.
In general, I’ve erred on the side of caution. If the top search result was for the brand’s .com, it was immediately ruled out, no matter how enthusiastic a dot-brand user the company otherwise appeared to be.
Here’s the list. Please let me know if you think I’ve missed any.
[table id=57 /]
Twenty-seven gTLDs is not a great many, of course, considering that some dot-brands have been delegated for half a decade already.
It’s about half as many as have already torn up their ICANN registry agreements, and it represents less than 6% of the new gTLDs that my database says have Spec 13 in their contracts.
But I reiterate that this is not a list of companies using their dot-brands but rather of those apparently putting their .com firmly in the back seat to their dot-brand.