Radix’s first gTLD landrushes only risk-free if you shop around

Radix Registry has gone into landrush with its first new gTLDs, promising a “risk-free” experience for buyers who want to get into .website, .press and .host early.
But different registrars are handling the phase in different ways — with a staggering range of prices — so you could still lose money on domains you don’t get unless you shop around.
Business head Sandeep Ramchandani confirmed that while Radix does not have any nonrefundable components at the registry end, it’s up to the individual registrars to decide whether to follow suit.
Radix has set up a microsite to help would-be registrants compare prices and find a registrar with a refundable fee.
It’s a useful tool, because prices vary wildly by registrar.
For .website, the lowest-cost of the three gTLDs, you’ll probably want to avoid Go Daddy. Its “priority pre-registration” service costs a whopping $174.98 for a bog-standard domain, compared to landrush fees around the $40 mark at all the other listed registrars.
General availability pricing for .website appears to be in line with .com, with Name.com and Go Daddy both listing GA domains at $14.99.
.press and .host, which cater to rather more niche markets, have correspondingly higher base pricing. Both will hit GA with pricing ranging from $100 to $130, it seems.
To apply for names in either during landrush you can expect to pay between $250 and $360, depending on registrar.
You’re also going to have a harder time finding a registrar that will refund landrush fees in .press and .host; Radix currently lists four registrars doing this for .press and only two for .host.
For premium names, Radix is going the now fairly industry standard route of charging premium fees on renewals as well as the initial registration.
investing.website will set you back $3,125 a year at Name.com, for example, while whiskey.website will cost $312.50 a year.
Go Daddy is not yet carrying Radix premium names.
Some names have five-figure renewal fees attached, Ramchandani said.
But he added that Radix has only set aside “a few hundred” premium names in each of the three TLDs, a much lower number than most previous new gTLD launches.
The idea is to get domains out there and in the hands of users, he said.
The new microsite also carries a few downloadable spreadsheets of supposedly attractive names that are available at the basic, non-premium registration fee.
Seasoned domain investors might find some bargains there (assuming they don’t go to landrush auction), but there are also some oddities.
Is wellnessfinder.website worthy of a recommendation, just because the domain+website wellnessfinder.com sold for €300,000 in 2011?
And to what possible use could you put a vagina.press? I shudder to think…

.hiv’s innovative, dangerous business model

.hiv, the first charity gTLD, is set to go to general availability at 2pm UTC tomorrow with one of the strangest and riskiest business models of any new gTLD to date.
While registrants will be able to use .hiv domains more or less as they please, as with any other gTLD, Berlin-based registry dotHIV is banking on an innovative microdonation system to set the space apart.
When you buy a .hiv domain, you’ll be sent an invitation by the registrar or registry to join an optional Click-Counter service, according to dotHIV chief marketing officer Michael Twist.
If you join the service, every time somebody visits your .hiv web site, dotHIV will donate a tenth of a US cent to one of four (initially) HIV/AIDS-related charity projects.
The donation will come from a pool of cash set aside by the registry from its registration fees.
While .hiv names are going to be sold, by 80 to 100 registrars at launch, for close to $200 per year, $120 of each registration or renewal fee will go into this charitable pool.
This business model is unprecedented in the domain name space, and it’s leading to the registry behaving in ways you wouldn’t expect from a new gTLD business.
For starters, dotHIV isn’t overly concerned about promoting its end users in a big way right out of the gates. It needs to refill its diminished cash pool to be able to cover the microdonations.
At first, it’s more concerned about volume and premium domain sales.
This problem is more pressing because of the longer-than-expected process of getting the .hiv application through the ICANN evaluation and delegation process.
“The microdonation system only works if we’ve got money in the pot,” said Twist. “The delay in the ICANN process has eaten up some of the funds.”
With a $120 donation from each sale, any given .hiv domain would only need to generate 1.2 million clicks in any given year to render it ‘unprofitable’ — ie, taking more from the pot than it put in.
dotHIV therefore needs time to ensure the pot of money from registrations is big enough to cover any big traffic spikes — what if a .hiv link goes viral, or a big-brand company starts using one? — before promoting the end-user sites in any meaningful way.
“First we need to push for registrations, and then traffic,” said Twist. “We can’t get too many people clicking before we hit a critical mass to support what we’re trying to do.”
There’s also the other possibility: that dotHIV, which is a registered charity, may wind up sitting on a pile of cash from registrations that is not going to its designated causes due to a lack of clicks on its users’ sites.
There’s risk in both directions, which begs the question: why not just donate the $120 to charity at the point of registration?
“More than just trying to raise funds what we’re doing is trying to raise awareness,” said Twist.
By encouraging (eventually) viral, click-based fund-raising, the registry hopes to put a spotlight back on the virus, which perhaps isn’t as trendy a cause as it once was due to the development of drugs that can delay the onset of AIDS by decades.
dotHIV is launching with some premium sales and some big-name anchor tenants under its belt.
Twist said that a “handful” of $10,000 names, which he declined to identify, have already been sold to pharmaceuticals companies involved in the development of HIV drugs.
There are about 10,000 reserved premiums in the space, he said, with a starting price of $5,000. Premium buyers will have to commit to usage rules including a commitment to use the Click-Tracker.
Keep a Child Alive, the charity founded by musician Alicia Keys, is among those committed to be early adopters and the Federation of Gay Games will use sport.hiv.
From the domain world, corporate registrars Mark Monitor and IP Mirror are to use .hiv domains.
There are no rules preventing domainers registering in .hiv (perhaps even treating it as a donation rather than an investment) but Twist said the registry would be disappointed to see large numbers of parked sites.

Straat-backed bidder beats Donuts and Afilias to .health

DotHealth has won the four-way contention set for the controversial new gTLD .health.
Afilias and Donuts both withdrew their competing applications this week. Famous Four withdrew its application over a month ago.
DotHealth is backed by Straat Investments, the investment vehicle chaired by .CO Internet’s Juan Calle.
The new gTLD will run on a Neustar (which now owns .CO) back-end.
.health is likely to be restricted, or at least policed, to ensure fake pharmacies are scrubbed from the zone.
DotHealth is supported by, among other health groups, the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy (NABP) which often targets registries and registrars in its campaigns against bogus online pharmacies in the US.
The company plans to use LegitScript to monitor its namespace.
.health will compete against the unrestricted .healthcare, which has been delegated to Donuts.
All four applicants for .health faced adverse Governmental Advisory Committee advice and unsuccessful public interest objections from the Independent Objector.

Biggest dot-brand? .realtor to give away half a million domains

Up to 500,000 card-carrying members of North American real estate associations will be given a free one-year .realtor domains, according to the registry.
The National Association of Realtors said its members and members of the Canadian Real Estate Association will be able to claim their names at claim.realtor.
The offer will become active October 23.
As “realtor” is a registered trademark belonging in the US to the NAR, there’s a pretty good chance .realtor could very soon become the largest dot-brand by volume.
The organization says it has a million members. The CREA, which owns the Canadian trademark on the term, has 100,000 members and will have 10,000 free registrations to hand out.

After slamming the ccNSO, India joins it

India has become the newest member of ICANN’s country-code Supporting Organization, the ccNSO, just one month after the local registry slammed the group for not representing its interests.
The National Internet Exchange (NIXI), which runs .in, became the 152nd ccNSO member yesterday, according to a note on its website.
I haven’t reported on the first 151 ccTLDs to join, but this one’s interesting because NIXI’s mononymed CEO, Dr Govind, led a charge of criticism against the ccNSO for excluding non-members from the IANA transition review.
In July, Govind complained that a “significant section of the ccTLD Registry operator community do not share the objectives of the ccNSO membership are now excluded from the process.”
By joining the ccNSO, registries agree to follow the policies it creates for ccTLDs (though I understand they may opt out), which has led 103 ccTLDs to stay out of it completely.
Some ccTLDs are primarily concerned that the ccNSO does nothing to dilute or overturn RFC 1591, the 20-year-old standards document that states ccTLDs can only be redelegated with the consent of the incumbent.

New gTLD registries increasingly attacking .com

Is .com “silly” and “meaningless”?
That’s what some new gTLD registries would have you believe.
In separate blog posts over the last week, Donuts and ARI Registry Services have gone on the offensive, dismissing .com as an irrelevant relic of a bygone age.
ARI CEO Adrian Kinderis branded .com as “meaningless and unintuitive” in a post slamming the Board of Racing Victoria, an Australian horse-racing organization, for the purchase of racing.com for (he claimed) $500,000.
New gTLDs with more semantic relevance to horse racing or geographic regions will make this purchase look “silly” in future, he said.

Take for instance .racing which is set to launch soon. It would offer a more creative and relevant domain name such as horses.racing, victorian.racing or vichorses.racing.

He also said that most Australians are conditioned to visit .com.au (for which ARI provides the registry back-end), which will lead to traffic leakage from racing.com to racing.com.au.

The problem is that racing.com does not have an intrinsic connection with Victorian horse racing that would lend itself to intuitive navigation and recall.

Donuts had a similar message in a blog post last week.
Donuts vice president Mason Cole said on that company’s blog that .com is “diluted and meaningless” when compared to more vertically oriented TLDs such as Donuts’ .photography and .bike.

It adds nothing to an identity. Except perhaps to say, “I’m on the Internet somewhere.” .COM is “1999” — not “today,” and definitely not the future. New .COM registrations are extraordinarily long and much less meaningful when compared to a new registration in a new gTLD. And with its recent price decreases on new registrations (which apparently is necessary to match their low quality), .COM now means “low quality and cheap.”

It will be interesting to see whether this kind of messaging will be carried over from lightly trafficked corporate blogs into more mainstream new gTLD marketing by registries.
What do you think? Do Donuts and ARI have a point? Is .com meaningless? Will it fall out of fashion? Is going negative on legacy gTLDs a wise strategy for new gTLD companies?

Reported mass exodus from .com explained

Did Verisign suffer from a massive 2,600% increase in the number of deleted .com domain names this April?
Not quite, although the bizarre spike in deletes may have highlighted an area where the company was previously out of compliance with its ICANN Registry Agreements.
April’s .com registry report, filed with ICANN and published last week, shows 2.4 million domains were deleted, compared to just 108,000 in March and 90,000 in April 2013.

The spike looks surprising, and you may be tempted to think it is in some way related to the arrival of new gTLDs.
But look again. Could .com, a registry with over 116 million domains under management, really only see roughly 100,000 deletes every month? Clearly that number is far too low.
So what’s going on? I asked Verisign.
The company said that it has implemented “voluntary” changes to its reporting of deleted domains, based on the standard new gTLD Registry Agreement, which specifies what must be reported by new gTLD registries.
It said:

Prior to the April 2014 monthly reports, and per the ICANN gTLD registry reporting guidelines, Verisign reported on only deleted domains outside of any grace period.

There are five “grace periods” permitted by ICANN contracts: the Add Grace Period, Renew/Extend Grace Period, Auto-Renew Grace Period, Transfer Grace Period, and Redemption Grace Period.
The familiar Add Grace Period allows registrars to cancel registrations within a week of registration if the registrant made a typo, for example, and asked for a refund.
The Redemption Grace Period covers domains that have expired and do not resolve, but can still be restored for 30 days at the request of the registrant.
According to Verisign, before April, domains that were deleted outside of any of the five grace periods were reported as “deleted-domains-nograce”.
From April, the company is reporting domains only as “deleted-domains-nograce” if they delete outside of the Add Grace Period.
According to my reading of the .com contract, that’s what Verisign should have been doing all along.
The contract, which Verisign and ICANN signed in late 2012, defines “deleted-domains-nograce” only as “domains deleted outside the add grace period”. There’s no mention of other grace periods.
The same definition can be found in the 2006 contract.
It appears to me that Verisign may have been under-reporting its deletes for quite some time.
Verisign said in response that it does not believe it has a compliance issue. A spokesperson said: “[We] voluntarily updated our reporting of deleting domain names so that our reporting is aligned with ICANN’s reporting clarifications for the new gTLDs.”

Infosys withdraws dot-brand bids

Indian consulting giant Infosys has dropped its bids for two dot-brand new gTLDs.
It withdrew its applications for .infosys and .infy this week, leaving it with no remaining applications.
Both bids were straightforward dot-brands applications with no objections or contention. Both had passed Initial Evaluation and were just awaiting contract signing.
Infosys, which provides business and IT consulting services and outsourcing, is listed on the New York Stock Exchange and had revenue of $8.4 billion in its last reported year.

Donuts wins .ltd gTLD contest

Donuts has emerged the victor of the contention set for .ltd, beating six other applicants for the new gTLD.
Dot Registry, NU DOT CO, Afilias and myLTD all withdrew their applications this week, evidently after a private auction.
LTD Registry and C.V. TLDcare withdrew their applications in April and May respectively.
The string is of course an abbreviation for “limited” as in “limited liability company”, used by privately held companies in many companies including the UK.
While bids for comparable TLDs such as .inc, .corp and .gmbh have received criticism from company regulators in the US and Germany, .ltd hasn’t raised as much of a ruckus.
Like all Donuts gTLDs, it looks like .ltd is set to be unrestricted.
I’m not a fan of corporate identifier TLDs. They always strike me as more prone to defensive registrations than other, more descriptive strings.

Verisign: 41% of new gTLD sites are parked

As much as 41% of domains registered in new gTLDs are parked with pay-per-click advertising, according to research carried out by Verisign.
That works out to over 540,000 domains, judging by the 1.3 million total I have on record from June 29, the day Verisign carried out the survey.
Domains classified as carrying “business” web sites — defined as “a website that shows commercial activity” — accounted for just 3% of the total, according to Verisign.
There are some big caveats, of course, not least of which is .xyz, which tends to skew any surveys based on “registered” names appearing in the zone file. Verisign noted:

XYZ.COM LLC (.xyz) has a high concentration of PPC websites as a result of a campaign that reportedly automatically registered XYZ domains to domain registrants in other TLDs unless they opted out of receiving the free domain name. After registration, these free names forward to a PPC site unless reconfigured by the end user registrant.

On June 29, .xyz had 225,159 domains in its zone file. I estimate somewhat over 200,000 of those names were most likely freebies and most likely parked.
The practice of registry parking, carried out most aggressively by Uniregistry and its affiliate North Sound, also threw off Verisign’s numbers.
Whereas most new gTLD registries reserve their premium names without adding them to the zone files, Uniregistry registers them via North Sound to park and promote them.
Tens of thousands of names have been registered in this way.
Coupled with the .xyz effect, this leads me to conclude that the number of domains registered by real registrants and parked with PPC is probably close to half of Verisign’s number.
That’s still one out of every five domains in new gTLDs, however.
Judging by a chart on Verisign’s blog, .photography appears to have the highest percentage of “business” use among the top 10 new gTLDs so far.
Verisign also found that 10% of the names it scanned redirect to a different domain. It classified these as redirects, rather than according to the content of their final destination.