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Rightside to auction “xyz” domains at NamesCon

Kevin Murphy, January 5, 2016, 09:22:01 (UTC), Domain Sales

.xyz made a bit of a splash with domain investors in 2015, but is the meaningless string “xyz” inherently attractive? Even at the second level?
Rightside seems to think so.
The registry, which does not operate .xyz, is planning to auction at least four “xyz” domains during next Monday’s live auction at the NamesCon conference in Las Vegas.
Rightside today disclosed that xyz.sale, xyz.market, xyz.news and xyz.live will be among about a dozen registry-reserved short domain names– such as q.sale and z.pub — it will attempt to sell.
The only meaningful domain on its list is the absolutely fantastic, category-killing viral.video.
It’s difficult to see the “xyz” names as anything other than attempt to cash in on the popularity of .xyz domains among the investors, many of them Chinese, currently pumping money into the domain market.
XYZ.com’s .xyz gTLD has over 1.7 million domains in its zone file today, making it the largest-volume new gTLD by a considerable margin.
I’m not sure there’s any causal connection here, but it should probably be noted that Daniel Negari and Michael Ambrose, XYZ.com’s CEO and COO respectively, recently acquired a substantial chunk of Rightside.
The two men disclosed November 30 that they had paid over $8.5 million to buy almost 10 million shares — or roughly 5.2% of the company — on the open market.
The NamesCon auction kicks off at 1400 Pacific (2200 UTC) on Monday at the Tropicana in Vegas. It’s being managed by RightOfTheDot and Namejet.

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Comments (2)

  1. Jerry Gitkin says:

    (The comment other Blogs removed)
    Names Con Auction
    Are they going to fix the PUMPed Prices?
    eg: Won . com Won Dot Com) shows at the Namescon Auction page (NJ) the ridiculous estibot valuation of 371,000 USD but if you valuate the same domain at the main source Estibot dot com… you get less than half: or 180,000 USD..what’s up with that?
    and there is a ton of other domains which valuations suddenly have increased…and this is exactly what Joseph Peterson talks about at DNW..Pump Pump..

  2. SoFreeDomain says:

    .XYZ will make an impact in the market this year.

Leave a Reply to Jerry Gitkin