XYZ launches its beauty-themed gTLDs with slashed prices

XYZ.com is readying the launch of its four recently acquired beauty-themed gTLDs, along with one other.

.skin, .hair .makeup and .beauty entered their sunrise periods today, where they will stay until February 10.

All four were acquired from L’Oreal earlier this year, but .makeup was the only one that had launched and gone through its mandatory sunrise.

Despite this, XYZ is putting .makeup through what it calls a “trademark owner landrush”, where domains will cost IP owners about a grand.

That’s actually a lot cheaper than the price L’Oreal had the domains at during general availability — deterrent pricing of around $5,500 wholesale per year.

It looks like all four domains in this mini-portfolio will be priced around the $20 mark at registrars during general availability, which is due to begin March 2.

There’s also going to be an Early Access Period for seven days from February 10.

All of the above also applies to .quest, which XYZ acquired from a Hong Kong multilevel marketing firm a year ago. XYZ is marketing it as a TLD for “gurus, knowledgeable experts, and authorities in any field”.

.spa registry relocates to .xyz

Newly installed .spa registry Asia Spa and Wellness Promotion Council has started using a .xyz domain for its official registry web site.

The organization last week had its IANA records updated to change its “URL for registration services” from aswpc.org to dotspa.xyz.

It currently resolves to a placeholder “Coming Soon” page.

Choosing a TLD other than its own, which entered the DNS root in September, is pretty unusual.

Most new gTLD registries activate nic.example pretty quickly after delegation, even if they ultimately use a domain such as get.example or register.example for their primary marketing sites.

Activating nic.example is actually an obligation under ICANN contracts. ASWPC has registered that domain, but only whois.nic.spa currently resolves.

The dotspa.xyz domain was registered about a year ago, about a month after ASWPC’s former business partner, DotAsia, washed its hands of its stake in the TLD.

Both the .com and .org versions have been registered for well over a decade, so perhaps .xyz was picked as the default third-choice generic.

But that still doesn’t explain why a registry would select a domain outside its own TLD for its primary site.

Are 25x price increases on the cards as XYZ corners the cars market?

Grab-happy registry XYZ.com has expanded its stable of strings to 22 after buying five little-used gTLDs from Dominion Registries.

It recently came into control of .autos, .motorcycles, .homes, .yachts, and .boats, CEO Daniel Negari confirmed earlier this week.

Following XYZ’s buyout of .auto, .car and .cars from former joint venture partner UNR a couple months back, it seems the company now pretty much has a lock on the English-language automotive domain market.

This raises the question, so far unanswered by the registry, about whether .autos registrants could be about to face some of the steepest price increases the new gTLD market has seen to date.

XYZ’s .auto, .car and .cars currently command among the highest base prices in the market — about $2,500 at retail for a basic, non-premium name — while .autos has been chugging along at $100 per domain per year.

It would make perfect sense for the registry to give its new acquisition a 25x price increase to align it with the rest of the automotive portfolio, but so far the company is tight-lipped on the subject.

Fortunately, the current pool of .autos registrants is quite small — a little over 400 names, about the same as .auto but a couple hundred ahead of .cars and .car — so there would not be many customers to piss off.

Indeed, three of the other TLDs XYZ just bought have what you might generously call “growth potential”.

The only one of the five gTLDs to have more than 500 domains under management is .homes, which has more than 13,000.

With XYZ’s broader channel reach and superior marketing prowess, there’s certainly upside on the horizon.

XYZ buys dormant gTLD from “pyramid scheme” operator

XYZ.com has bought another unused dot-brand to add to its portfolio.
It’s taken over the contract for .quest from original registry Quest ION Ltd, a subsidiary of a Hong Kong-based multi-level marketing company called QNet, according to ICANN records.
The gTLD will become the 13th that XYZ has a stake in, and the second dormant dot-brand that it’s acquired, after .monster.
.quest has been delegated for a few years, but its owner had no live domains beyond the mandatory NIC site.
I have to say I was unfamiliar with the company until today, but QNet’s Wikipedia page makes it sound sufficiently dodgy that I’m surprised nobody raised questions about its suitability to be a registry during the ICANN application process.
Its multi-level marketing business model has been described as a “pyramid scheme” or “Ponzi scheme” by various governments and has seen QNet hit by serious legal challenges in many countries on at least four continents.
Loads of its executives, including at least one listed on the gTLD application, have been arrested over the years.
But I guess that’s water under the bridge now, because XYZ has taken control of .quest.
There’s no word yet on a launch date.

Cloudflare “bug” reveals hundreds of secret domain prices

The secret wholesale prices for hundreds of TLDs have been leaked, due to an alleged “bug” at a registrar.
The registry fees for some 259 TLDs, including those managed by Donuts, Verisign and Afilias, are currently publicly available online, after a programmer used what they called a “bug” in Cloudflare’s API to scrape together price lists without actually buying anything.
Cloudflare famously busted into the domain registrar market last September by announcing that it would sell domains at cost, thumbing its nose at other registrars by suggesting that all they’re doing is “pinging an API”.
But because most TLD registries have confidentiality clauses in their Registry-Registrar Agreements, accredited registrars are not actually allowed to reveal the wholesale prices.
That’s kind of a problem if you’re a registrar that has announced that you will never charge a markup, ever.
Cloudflare has tried to get around this by not listing its prices publicly.
Currently, it does not sell new registrations, instead only accepting inbound transfers from other registrars. Registry transaction reports reveal that it has had tens of thousands of names transferred in, but has not created a significant number of new domains.
(As an aside, it’s difficult to see how it could ever sell a new reg without first revealing its price and therefore breaking its NDAs.).
It appears that the only way to manually ascertain the wholesale prices of all of the TLDs it supports would be to buy one of each at a different registrar, then transfer them to Cloudflare, thereby revealing the “at cost” price.
This would cost over $9,500, at Cloudflare’s prices, and it’s difficult to see what the ROI would be.
However, one enterprising individual discovered via the Cloudflare API that the registrar was not actually checking whether they owned a domain before revealing its price.
They were therefore able to compile a list of Cloudflare’s prices and therefore the wholesale prices registries charge.
The list, and the script used to compile it, are both currently available on code repository Github.
The bulk of the list comprises Donuts’ vast portfolio, but most TLDs belonging to Afilias (including the ccTLD .io), XYZ.com and Radix are also on there.
It’s not possible for me to verify that all of the prices are correct, but the ones that are comparable to already public information (such as .com and .net) match, and the rest are all in the ballpark of what I’ve always assumed or have been privately told they were.
The data was last refreshed in April, so without updates its shelf life is likely limited. Donuts, for example, is introducing price increases across most of its portfolio this year.

XYZ weighs into Epik controversy with .monster fundraising domain

New gTLD registry XYZ.com has set up a domain to help raise money for victims of the terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand last week.
The domain is give.monster. It redirects to a page on Givealittle.co.nz, a Kiwi crowdfunding site, that has so far raised almost NZD 7.8 million ($5.3 million) for the victims of the attack, which killed 50 and injured many more last Friday.
Given the amount of coverage in the New Zealand press, it appears that the fundraising page is legit.
The domain is obviously a reference to Epik.com CEO Rob Monster, who has come in for criticism this week for hosting and sharing the terrorist’s video of the attack, and then suggesting it might be a hoax, as I blogged earlier today.
XYZ is able to create this domain because it is the registry for .monster, a gTLD it acquired last year that is currently slap-bang in the middle of its early access launch period.
Whois records show that the domain was created a little over an hour ago and belongs to XYZ.com LLC.
I learned about it through this comment on DI:

We are sorry to see this in our industry… Please visit http://www.Give.Monster and donate to support victims of the horrific Christchurch shootings. Thank you for your support.

XYZ.com is the registry for .xyz, .college, .rent and other gTLDs. .monster previously belonged to recruitment web site Monster.com.

XYZ reveals .monster gTLD launch dates

XYZ.com has quietly unveiled its launch plan for its recently acquired gTLD, .monster.
General availability, with no eligibility requirements, is due to begin April 1.
The 30-day sunrise period is due to begin in just a couple of weeks — February 18.
.monster was acquired late last year from recruitment web site Monster.com, which had intended to operate it as a dot-brand, for an undisclosed sum.
Before the acquisition closed, Monster and ICANN amended the registry contract to cut the special dot-brand terms that would have removed the need for a sunrise period and would have prevented the domain being sold to regular registrants.
XYZ also intends to run a week-long Early Access Period — where premium prices apply — starting March 21.
I quite like the idea of .monster as an open gTLD.
While it’s certainly not going to perform as well volume-wise as .xyz, say, I can see it fitting nicely into the “quirky” niche occupied currently but the likes of Donuts’ .guru and .ninja — not really viable as standalone TLDs, but decent enough as part of a portfolio.
The company is pitching the TLD as “a domain for creative thinkers, masters of their craft, and modern-day renegades.”

Another bundle of joy for XYZ as Johnson & Johnson throws out the .baby

XYZ.com seems to have acquired the .baby gTLD from Johnson & Johnson.

ICANN records show that the .baby registry contract was assigned to the growing portfolio registry November 19.

The news, which has yet to be announced by buyer or seller, arrives four years after J&J paid $3,088,888 for .baby at an ICANN last-resort auction, beating off five other applicants.

.baby is not what you’d call a roaring success. It has about 600 domains under management after almost two years of general availability.

It typically retails for about $80.

While the plan for .baby was to keep it quite tightly controlled, with J&J giving itself broad rights to refuse registration of any domain that did not appear to fit within its family-friendly mission, it does not seem that regime was strictly enforced.

Explain realdonaldtrump.baby

I would expect XYZ, with its come-all attitude to domains, to be even more relaxed about the namespace.

IANA records show that the gTLD under J&J was (and still is) managed by FairWinds, with a Neustar back-end. Neither are typical partners for XYZ, which tends to use CentralNic.

I think this makes it 12 gTLDs for the XYZ stable, including those it runs in partnership. It has 10 listed on its web site and it picked up former dot-brand .monster from Monster.com a couple months back.

J&J also owns the dot-brand .jnj, which has about 100 domains in its zone but no publicly facing web sites to speak of.

Numeric .xyz names plummet despite dollar deal

XYZ.com’s effort to sell over a billion numeric .xyz domains at just $0.65 each does not appear to be gaining traction.
The number of qualifying domains in the .xyz zone file has plummeted by almost 200,000 since the deal was introduced and dipped by over 4,000 since the blanket discount went live.
The $0.65 registry fee applies to what XYZ calls the “1.111B Class” of domains — all 1.111 billion possible six, seven, eight and nine-digit numeric .xyz domains.
These domains carry a recommended retail price of $0.99.
It’s not a promotional price. It’s permanent and also applies to renewals.
Some registrars opted to start offering the lower price from June 1, but it did not come into effect automatically for all .xyz registrars until November 11
The number of domains in this class seems to be on a downward trend, regardless.
There were 272,589 such domains May 31, according to my analysis of .xyz zone files, but that was down to 74,864 on December 5.
On November 10, the day before the pricing became uniform, there were 78,256 such domains. That shows a decline of over 4,000 domains over the last four weeks.
It’s possible that the 1.111B offer is attracting registrants, but that their positive impact on the numbers is being drowned out by unrelated negative factors.
The period of the 200,000-name decline coincides with the massive mid-July junk drop, in which .xyz lost over half of its total active domains due to the expiration of domains registered for just a penny or two in mid-2015.
Many of those penny domains were numeric, due to interest from speculators from China, where such names have currency.
The period also coincides with a time in which XYZ was prohibited from selling via Chinese registrars, due to a problem changing its Real Names Verification provider.
In recent marketing, XYZ has highlighted some interesting uses of 1.111B domains, including a partnership with blockchain cryptocurrency Ethereum.
Other registrants are using the domains to match important dates and autonomous system numbers.

XYZ relaunches .storage with $2,200 price tag

XYZ.com has reopened .storage to registrations with a new, much higher price tag.
A confusingly named “Trademark Holder Landrush” started yesterday and will run for three weeks.
It’s not a sunrise period — .storage already had its ICANN-mandated sunrise under its previous management — and it appears that it’s not actually restricted to trademark holders.
The .storage web site states that “neither registrars nor XYZ will validate trademarks during this period”. The registry says that all strings, including generic words, are available.
It basically appears to be just a way to squeeze a little extra cash out of larger companies and anyone else desperate for a good name.
There are not many registrars carrying the TLD right now, just five brand protection registrars and 101domain.
101domain prices the names at $699.99 with a $1,500 application fee during the trademark landrush.
XYZ says that the regular suggested retail price for .storage will be $79.99 per month which seems to be a roundabout way of saying $948 per year. There’s no option to register for less than a year.
.storage is designed for companies in the data storage and physical storage industries, so adopting a high-price, low-volume business model is probably a smart move by the registry.
It’s a similar model to that XYZ employs in its car-related gTLDs operated in partnership with Uniregistry.
XYZ does not appear to be relying entirely on defensive registrations to make its coin, however.
It’s offering a “complimentary” web site migration service, usually priced at $10,000, that it says can help early registrants switch to .storage in as little as 72 hours with no loss of search engine juice.
.storage was originally owned by Extra Storage Space, a physical storage company, but XYZ acquired the contract for an undisclosed sum in May.
The trademark landrush will be immediately followed by an Early Access Period, during which there will also be a sliding-scale fee (day one will be a whopping $55,000 at 101domain!), before general available starts a month from now.