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Possibly the strangest new gTLD acquisition yet

Kevin Murphy, February 5, 2020, Domain Registries

The company running .icu has taken over a similar-sounding but ugly dot-brand from a Chinese games company.
ShortDot took over the ICANN registry agreement for .cyou from a Chinese games company in November, recently updated ICANN records show.
The seller is Beijing Gamease Age Digital Technology Co, which makes massively multiplayer online games targeted at the Chinese market.
The company is branded as Changyou.com and CYOU is its Nasdaq ticker symbol. The .cyou gTLD was not technically a dot-brand under ICANN rules.
Changyou signed its registry agreement with ICANN five years ago, but never registered any .cyou domains.
The decision to dump .cyou is no doubt related to the fact that Changyou is currently in the process of being reacquired and delisted by Sohu, its majority owner and former parent. The domain presumably soon will have no meaning for the company, even defensively.
It’s such a clumsy, otherwise meaningless string, that surely there was one one potential home for it: the .icu registry. Just as .icu can be read as “I see you”, .cyou can be read as “see you”.
ShortDot has had an inexplicable success with .icu in the last 12 months, during which it has become the industry volume leader in new gTLD sales. Today’s zone files show over SIX MILLION domains have been registered. That’s up from about 400,000 a year ago.
Most of its sales are coming via Chinese registrars, which are selling .icu names for under a dollar for the first year. It has yet to see its first junk drop.
If SpamHaus statistics are any guide, the buyers are largely domainers, rather than spammers. SpamHaus says .icu has under a 2% “badness” rating.
So, while .cyou would look like utter rubbish to any other registry, if ShortDot can bundle it with .icu, perhaps persuading a portion of its registrants to double-up, it may be worth a bit of money.
The registry expects to launch its new acquisition in June.
It’s the second branded gTLD ShortDot has acquired and repurposed after .bond, which used to belong to a university of the same name.