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.pay sunrise going gangbusters
Amazon’s .pay gTLD is seeing defensive sunrise registrations selling far in excess of what you’d normally expect from a new gTLD launch.
.pay went into sunrise April 14, with an expected 30-day window for trademark owners to register their brands, but Amazon recently extended the deadline until July 20.
As of yesterday, the .pay zone file contained 683 domains, almost all of which were added after April 14.
While modest compared to sunrises carried out 15 to 25 years ago, that’s far ahead of average, and .pay seems to be adding a handful of new domains every day.
Official ICANN figures tracking gTLD launches through August 2018 show that the mean average sunrise regs per TLD was roughly 137, with a median of just 77 across 491 sunrise periods.
I see two primary reasons why .pay is ahead of the average.
First, the sensitivity of the string. Any gTLD that invites trust and the transfer of money would likely be a prime target for phishing and other types of abuse.
Second, .pay is not on commercial domain blocking services, such as GoDaddy-led GlobalBlock, meaning the only sure-fire way to protect a brand right now is to engage with sunrise.
Amazon says it plans to offer a Limited Registration Period from July 20, during which domains can be registered by those “that conduct payment transactions online using an approved Payment Service Provider or Third-Party Payment Processor.”
General availability is pencilled in for February next year.
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