Recent Posts
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UNR cuts $5.2 million from price of new gTLD portfolio
UNR has reduced the opening bids on almost all of the gTLDs it plans to auction off later in the week, to the tune of a whopping $5.2 million.
According to the minimum opening bids listed on the auction web site today, the job lot of 23 TLD contracts could go for as little as $11.65 million, if there’s no competitive bidding whatsoever.
That’s compared to the $16.87 million total when the TLDs were first announced for auction back in January.
It’s a no-reserve auction of UNR’s entire portfolio of gTLDs that runs from Wednesday to Friday this week.
Some gTLDs, such as .hiv and .juegos, have no minimum bids.
The only TLD to receive a price increase since January is .llp, which had a $0 listing back then but is now listed at $200,000. There’s been no change in .llp’s fortunes since then — it’s still unlaunched.
The music-themed .country, which had no list price in January, now has a $300,000 tag.
The biggest discount comes on .link, once listed with a $3 million opener, now reduced to $2 million.
Nine of the gTLDs are now priced at below the original ICANN application fee of $186,000.
Here’s a table comparing the January minimum bid to today’s pricing.
[table id=66 /]
UNR, which sold off its registrar and secondary market businesses to GoDaddy and its stakes in three car-themed gTLDs to XYZ.com last year, plans to remodel itself as a back-end operator post-auction.
UPDATE: According to UNR, the January prices were preliminary and published accidentally, and no changes have been made since late January or early February.
Since half these are banned by GoDaddy, the value isn’t much to anyone except…GoDaddy!
What a scam the register being a registry has become. Is Frank in bed with GoDaddy? Is this a team effort? A collab to pick things up on the cheap? Great precedent our ‘pioneers’ are setting up here /sarc.
BOTH them were the pioneers in the dual purpose business model…hmmm. DANGEROUS!
Let’s not forget, Frank raised the price around 1000% on a dozen of these. That is despite his contract application obligations NOT to. He reneged on US. ICANN is complacent in all of it.
There have been no changes to our starting prices since late January / early February – before any bidders had received access to the data room. The “January” prices in your table were preliminary numbers we forgot to update on auction.link before pushing the site live. We promptly updated them a couple days later and have not touched them since.