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Amazon and Google deal on .talk, .play, .drive and others

Kevin Murphy, July 26, 2014, Domain Registries

Google and Amazon have started making deals to settle their new gTLD contention sets.
Google won three contention sets against Amazon this week, judging by the latest withdrawals, while Amazon won two.
Amazon won .talk and .you after Google, the only other applicant, withdrew.
Neither company appears to have a “You” brand, unless you count YouTube, but the .talk settlement strongly suggests that Google Talk, the company’s instant messaging client, is on the way out.
When Google applied for .talk in 2012 it intended to give Talk users custom domains to act as a contact point, but in 2013 Google started to indicate that it will be replaced as a brand by Google Hangouts.
The withdrawal seems to suggest that the existence of a gTLD application, a relatively small investment, is not an overwhelming factor when companies consider product rebranding.
I wonder what effect a live, active TLD will have on similar decisions in future.
But Google won the two-horse races for .dev and .drive and after Amazon withdrew its applications.
Google has a product called Google Drive, while Amazon runs Amazon Cloud Drive. Both companies have developer programs, though Google’s is arguably the more substantial of the two.
Google has also won .play — Google Play is its app store — after Amazon, Radix and Star Registry’s withdrawals. Amazon does not have a Play brand.
Google has also withdrawn its application for .book, leaving six remaining applicants, including Amazon, in the contention set.
I don’t currently know whether these contention sets were settled privately or via a third-party auction.

.tk passes 25 million domains

Kevin Murphy, July 21, 2014, Domain Registries

The .tk registry has become only the second TLD to pass 25 million domain names.
Netherlands-based Dot TK passed the milestone at the weekend, according to statistics posted on its web site, and today has 25,068,128 domains under management.
It’s grown by a whopping 837,703 names in the last 30 days alone.
That means Tokelau, the tiny island nation the ccTLD represents, has a nominal 17,900 domains per citizen.
The reason for the huge numbers is that .tk names are usually free to register anywhere in the world, with Dot TK using a freemium model through which it only makes money from add-on services.
.tk became the largest ccTLD last year, hitting 16.7 million names in April 2013 and passing Germany’s .de, which today has about 15.7 million domains under management.
Being free, you’d expect there to be a disproportionate amount of nefarious activity in .tk, but that does not appear to be the case any more.
The TLD doesn’t show up in the top 10 most abused TLDs in the most recent report of the Anti-Phishing Working Group (pdf).
Architelos says (pdf) it’s the 47th-safest out of 72 TLDs, scoring it better than .com, .net, .co and many other popular TLDs.

That’s all folks! Final gTLD app gets approved

Kevin Murphy, July 21, 2014, Domain Registries

ICANN has finally finished evaluating all 1,930 new gTLD applications from the 2012 round.
Indian conglomerate Tata Group’s dot-brand .tata passed Extended Evaluation (pdf) on Friday, having apparently secured the non-objection of Morocco, which has a province of the same name.
Calculated from Reveal Day — June 13, 2012 — it’s taken a little over two years (765 days) for every bid to pass through first Initial Evaluation and then, if necessary, Extended Evaluation.
Calculated from the first batch of Initial Evaluation results being released, it’s 483 days.
A total of 1,783 applications passed IE. A further 38 failed, of which 35 passed EE. There have been 211 withdrawals so far and, due to contention, another 380 are expected.

Dot-brands get another year to sign ICANN contract

Kevin Murphy, July 16, 2014, Domain Registries

ICANN has offered dot-brand gTLD applicants the ability to delay the signing of their Registry Agreements until July 29, 2015, nine months later than under the former process.
The extension was offered by ICANN after talks with the Brand Registry Group, whose members felt pressured by the old deadline.
All new gTLD applicants had previously been told they had nine months to sign the contract from the date they receive a so-called “Contracting Information Request” from ICANN.
For many applicants, those CIRs were sent out many months ago, leading to an October 29 deadline.
However, Specification 13 of the contract, which allows dot-brands to opt out of things like sunrise periods and equal treatment of registrars, was not finalized by ICANN until May 14 this year.
Only a minuscule number of dot-brands eligible to sign contracts — which is pretty much all of them — have so far opted to do so.
Bearing the Spec 13 delay in mind, ICANN is now offering would-be dot-brands the July 2015 deadline instead, as long as they show “good faith” by responding to their CIR by September 1.
What this means is that dot-brands might not be hitting the internet for another year.
For non-branded gTLD registries — some of whom hope the big brands’ adoption and marketing will help the visibility of new gTLDs in general — this may be disappointing.

.moscow beats .москва 22-to-1 in sunrise

Kevin Murphy, July 14, 2014, Domain Registries

The concurrent sunrise periods of .moscow and .москва have unsurprisingly seen the Latin-script new gTLD trounce the Cyrillic version.
There were 154 registrations in .moscow, according to FAITID, the registry for both gTLDs, compared to just seven in .москва.
They’re both pretty low numbers, but they’re quite typical for new gTLDs. The .moscow number is actually a little above average.
And two of the IDN registrations appear to be for generic terms — мы.москва (“we.moscow”) and скачать.москва (“download.moscow”) — masquerading as trademarks, which happens a lot in new gTLDs.
There are many reasons why the Latin script beat the Cyrillic.
Sergey Gorbunov, head of international relations at FAITID, said that Russian holders of Cyrillic-script trademarks may not be very familiar with the Trademark Clearinghouse.
There are only 127 Cyrillic strings protected in the TMCH right now, he said. Non-Russian brands are also less likely to have their names protected in Cyrillic, he said.
Apple registered 11 Latin-script domains in the sunrise, according to Gorbunov, making it the biggest single registrant.
In what is possibly the longest launch phase of any new gTLD to date, there now follow two “Limited Registration Periods” for Russia and Moscow-based organizations, which end August 25.
A landrush period will kick off September 24 and FAITID expects to go to general availability on December 1.

The top 35 most-popular new gTLD sites

Kevin Murphy, July 14, 2014, Domain Registries

New gTLDs have been on the market for months now, and the slow process of building out sites is underway.
As regular readers and DI PRO subscribers know, one way DI tracks the popularity of domain names, and therefore their corresponding TLDs, is using Alexa rankings.
These scores are not perfect, but they’re a reasonable way to highlight which new gTLD domain names are getting traffic from internet users.
There are currently 635 new gTLD domains in Alexa’s top one million most-trafficked sites, up from just 10 when I checked almost six months ago, February 19.
Only 35 of those have a ranking better than 100,000.
I visited each in turn today to determine to what use the registrants have put their names.
In this top 35, I found two instances of apparent malware distribution and one instance of possible cybersquatting. Four returned errors. One (www.link) is a blocked name collision name.
Notably, controversial BitTorrent index The Pirate Bay, which has been TLD-hopping for many months and recently got kicked out of .guru, seems to have found a home in .uno.
Only one of the domains redirects to a domain in a different TLD.
One (gen.xyz) is a new gTLD registry’s official homepage.
The remainder represent a broad cross section of regular internet usage: blogs, tools, photos, sport, porn, get-rich-quick schemes, forums, file-hosting, and so on and so forth.
Varying degrees of professionalism can be found on these sites. Some are very pretty, others very ugly.
There’s even one site on the list that appears to be a legitimate corporate home page. On reflection, no it isn’t. It’s a Get-Rich-Quick site.
These are my results, make of them what you will.
[table id=30 /]

.co.com launch compares well to new gTLDs

Kevin Murphy, July 10, 2014, Domain Registries

The subdomain service .co.com, which is being managed more or less like a proper gTLD, reckons it outperformed every new gTLD earlier this week.
CEO Ken Hansen and president Paul Goldstone made the claim in a couple of Facebook posts yesterday.

Hansen clarified today that while the company is not releasing precise numbers, .co.com had “single digit thousands of registrations” following its landrush, which ended July 8.
To outperform every new gTLD, .co.com would have had to have beaten .xyz, which had a relatively quiet day (for .xyz) on July 8, adding just 1,267 names.
We can assume .co.com had somewhere between 1,268 and 9,999 registrations, therefore. I’d err to the lower end of that range, personally.
Those names would have been added cumulatively over the course of the three-month landrush and the preceding sunrise.
Still, it’s not bad for a subdomain, given that many proper new gTLDs are struggling to achieve similar numbers on their launch days.

ICM scraps free .xxx porn star offer, starts new one

Kevin Murphy, July 10, 2014, Domain Registries

ICM Registry has partnered with a company called Model Centro to offer free .xxx domain names to porn performers.
Model Centro offers porn models a managed fan site and social networking service. It’s free to the models, with the company taking a 15% slice of whatever subscription fees are taken from their fans.
The arrangement seems to be related to the sale of Models.xxx, which ICM held back as a premium name until this week but which now mirrors the old modelcentro.com.
The deal will see each Models.xxx user get one free .xxx domain.
It also means ICM’s Adult Performer Program, which reserved the names of 3,500 porn stars and allowed them to be claimed for free via Name.com is no more.
The company said in a statement that the two-year-old program has been scrapped.
The new deal is probably better for .xxx. Because Models.xxx is a web site service, each free domain given away is going to turn into a site almost immediately, potentially increasingly the gTLD’s visibility.
The same group that runs Model Centro also recently acquired the premium bukkake.xxx, while another bought extreme.xxx and public.xxx. The three sold for a total of $150,000, according to the registry.

Slow start for .christmas with under 500 sales

Kevin Murphy, July 10, 2014, Domain Registries

Uniregistry’s latest new gTLDs .christmas and .blackfriday seem to have stumbled out of the gates, both amassing fewer than 500 registrations in their first full day of general availability.
In today’s zone files, .christmas has 501 names and .blackfriday has 445. Those numbers include dozens of sunrise registrations. They both went to GA on Tuesday afternoon UTC.
As you might expect, the .christmas zone comprises a mix of brands and generic words and phrases related to retail and travel. It’s a similar state of affairs in .blackfriday.
What there do not appear to be are large numbers of product categories registered, suggesting that domainers feel that the new gTLDs fail Uniregistry CEO Frank Schilling’s own Toilet Paper Test.
That’s where one judges the potential popularity of a TLD by putting the string “toiletpaper” at the second level.
Domainer Mike Berkens appears to have picked up a handful of decent-looking names, including santatracker.christmas (NORAD’s Santa tracker got 19.58 million unique visitors last year) and whatiwantfor.christmas.
Schilling himself paid $90,000 — half the price of a new gTLD application fee — for blackfridaysales.com back in 2010. In November 2009, Kevin Ham’s blackfriday.com purportedly took 18 million visitors.
Neither Uniregistry TLD appears to be available currently at Go Daddy, despite the two companies’ reported distribution deal.
.christmas and .blackfriday are notable because they’re the first TLDs to launch that are tied to specific calendar dates. Those dates are of course several months away.
I have a feeling that it may prove tough to build up sustainable buzz for these TLDs.
Even if they’re used by big brands in marketing campaigns this year, which is of course by no means assured, it’s still going to take another year to figure out whether they’ve captured the imagination of their target markets.
In an industry of long plays, these could be two of the longer ones.

Pinyin to beat IDN? .wang ready to overtake .在线

Kevin Murphy, July 8, 2014, Domain Registries

The .wang gTLD has seen great success, relatively, in its first week of general availability, crossing the 30,000 mark yesterday and entering the top 10 new gTLDs by registration volume.
At its current rate of growth, the Zodiac Holdings domain is going to overtake .在线, the highest-ranking Chinese gTLD so far, this week.
.wang went to GA June 30. After its initial spike, it’s added one to two thousand names per day and, with 31,011 names today, currently sits at 9th place in the new gTLD program’s league table.
That’s a whisker behind TLD Registry’s .在线 (“.online”), which had a strong start when it launched at the end of April but has since plateaued at around 33,000 names, adding just a handful each day.
A skim through the zone files reveals that the vast majority of the names in .wang appear to be, like .wang itself, Pinyin — the official Latin-script transliterations of Chinese-script words.
.wang, which would be “网” in Chinese script, means “net”.
To pluck a couple of names from the zone at random, I see tanpan.wang, which could mean something like “negotiation.net” and xingshi.wang, which may or may not mean “shape.net”.
I suspect that many of the registered domains are personal names rather than dictionary words. Wang is a popular surname in China.
The vast majority of the names also appear to be registered via China-based registrars, some of which are promoting the TLD strongly on their home pages.
There certainly appears to be a lot of domainer activity in .wang, but I haven’t seen anything yet to suggest a massive orchestrated effort that would throw out the numbers considerably.
Either way, I find it fascinating that a Latin transliteration of a Chinese word seems set to out-perform the actual Chinese IDNs currently on the market.