With mystery auction winner, .sexy prices go from $25 to $2,500
UNR is increasing the annual price of a .sexy domain from $25 to over $2,000, according to registrars.
The price increase will hit from April 30, according to registrars, but will not affect renewals on domains registered before that date.
French registrar Gandi said its retail price for a .sexy name will increase from $40 to $2,750. That’s after its mark-up. Belgian registrar Bnamed said in January prices were about to get 100 times more expensive.
The current wholesale price for .sexy is believed to be $25 a year. I’m guessing it’s going up to about $2,500, which is a price tag UNR has previously experimented with for its car-related gTLDs.
UNR CEO Frank Schilling has previously defended steep price increases for TLDs that under-perform volume-wise.
.sexy had barely 6,000 names under management at the last count, having peaked at about 28,000 in 2017.
The question is: who’s decided to increase the prices? Did .sexy actually sell when UNR tried to offload its portfolio last year, or is UNR keeping hold of it?
.sexy was among the 23 gTLD contracts UNR said it sold, mostly at auction, about a year ago. But it’s not one of the ones where the buyer has been yet disclosed.
The gTLDs UNR said it sold were: .audio, .blackfriday, .christmas, .click, .country, .diet, .flowers, .game, ,guitars, .help, .hiphop, .hiv, .hosting, .juegos, .link, .llp, .lol, .mom, .photo, .pics, .property, .sexy and .tattoo.
Of those, a new company called Dot Hip Hop bought .hiphop and XYZ.com bought .audio, .christmas, .diet, .flowers, .game, .guitars, .hosting, .lol, .mom and .pics.
ICANN has approved those 11 contract reassignments — after some difficulty — and said that there are six remaining in the approval process.
That only adds up to 17, meaning there are six more that UNR said it sold but for which it had not, as of a week ago, requested a contract transfer.
But in May last year, UNR “announced gross receipts of more than $40 million USD for its 20+ TLDs”, said there had be 17 participating bidders, and that 10 to 20 had “came away as winners, including six who will be operating TLDs for the first time”.
That leaves with at least five as-yet undisclosed winners from outside the industry, six contract transfers outstanding, and six gTLDs with an unknown status.
Neither UNR nor ICANN have been commenting on the status of pending transfers.
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Is there any indication as to whether the upcoming price increase will apply to a .SEXY domain sold after 30 April but registered before that date?