DNA has new plan for gTLD auctions: give us your money!

The Domain Name Association is hoping to raise funds for marketing by hosting private new gTLD auctions, according to executive director Kurt Pritz.
Chair Adrian Kinderis made the pitch at a meeting of the New TLD Applicants Group today.
The DNA is hoping to tempt applicants that are reluctant to participate in existing private auction schemes because they don’t want their money going to competitors.
Instead, the winning bid in an auction managed by the DNA would go straight into the DNA’s marketing and operations budget, to the potential benefit of the whole new gTLD industry.
Participating applicants would get to choose how the money would be split been marketing and the general DNA kitty.
The organization hasn’t picked an auction provider yet, and no applicants are yet committed to the plan, Pritz said.

Best anchor tenant ever? 50 Cent to use a .club

The American rapper Curtis ’50 Cent’ Jackson has become the first big-name celebrity to get in on the new gTLD game, announcing today that he’s launching a fan site on a .club domain.
He’ll launch 50inda.club at a .CLUB Domains launch event in New York on May 22, the registry has just announced.
‘In Da Club’ was the name of his breakthrough single in 2003.
A quote in a press release, attributed to Jackson, said:

As I prepare to launch `Animal Ambition’ on June 3 and my new drama `Power’ on Starz, the timing was right to give my fans a central web location to stay on top of all my latest news and social updates. I like to stay on the cutting edge, and 50inda.club represents the new wave of Internet names that actually mean something to me and my fans.

Fiddy has 7.41 million Twitter followers. That’s the kind of social media exposure not many other — probably no other — new gTLD operators have managed to achieve to date.
This, in my view, is a huge coup and is exactly the kind of thing new gTLDs need to be doing to get the word out about new gTLDs.

.club on track to topple .guru?

.CLUB Domains sold an additional 4,904 domain names on its second day — its first full day — of general availability, taking it into the top five new gTLD registries by volume.
The zone started today with 30,680 names, compared to sixth-place .email’s 28,127.
I noted yesterday that in order for .club to hit its target of beating leader .guru to the top spot in the first week, .club would have to move something like 4,500 names per day all week.
While today’s numbers are certainly in line with that target, I doubt .club will hit the number one spot by next Thursday.
Growth typically tails off shortly after general availability begins, and weekends are slow days, generally, for domain name registrations.
The best-performing new gTLDs to date generally add a net couple hundred names per day.

.club tops 25,000 names on day one

The new gTLD .club got to 25,776 domains in its first 10 hours of general availability yesterday.
According to today’s zone file data, that makes it the sixth-largest new gTLD by volume.
It’s the third-best launch day after .berlin and .在线, I believe.
The count does not include any substantial amount of premium or registry-reserved names. Registry CEO Colin Campbell told us yesterday that just 46 names in the zone are owned by the registry.
If .CLUB Domains still expects to beat .guru, which has 54,868 domains today, in its first week it’s going to have to sell something like 4,500 domains every day for the next seven days.
No other new gTLD has anything close to that kind of daily volumes during general availability.

.club “hits top 10” new gTLDs in minutes

The new .club gTLD went into the top 10 new gTLDs by volume in the “first instants” of general availability this afternoon, according to the registry and partner Go Daddy.
.CLUB Domains CEO Colin Campbell told DI, about two hours after the 1500 UTC GA launch, “We’ll let the zone files speak for themselves, but we were well within the top 10 a few minutes after we opened up.”
Based on today’s zone file data, that means .club moved at least 15,000 names. It will presumably be a somewhat bigger number by the time today’s zones are published at 0100 UTC.
.CLUB CMO Jeff Sass said that pre-registrations at registrars including Go Daddy were responsible for the initial spike.
“We would be in the top 10 based just on those pre-registrations in the first instant,” he said.
While over 50 registrars are signed up to sell .club, the registry is pretty tight with Go Daddy.
The two companies have been conducting joint marketing, some of which involved .CLUB pushing buyers to GoDaddy.club.
“We’ve worked closely on cooperative marketing efforts,” Sass said. “We’ve done a lot of campaigns where the call to action has been to Go Daddy.”
The GA launch, which was briefly webcast live, actually came from Go Daddy’s Arizona headquarters.
While I get the distinct impression that money changed hands in order for Go Daddy to throw its weight behind .club, VP Mike McLaughlin gave some reasons why he likes the gTLD.
“We like to see that the registry is invested,” he said. “That the business plan isn’t just to put it out there and hope for the best.”
Sass said that .CLUB has been marketing to nightclubs, sports clubs, high-end members clubs and others.
McLaughlin said the price point — $14.99 retail, the same as Go Daddy’s .com renewals — and the fact that there are no registration restrictions, were attractive.
.CLUB has reserved over 6,000 premium names. They’re all listed for sale at Sedo, perhaps showing that its relationship with rival auction platform Go Daddy/Afternic is not all that tight.
If you try to register a premium .club via Go Daddy today you’ll be told it’s unavailable.
Sass said that examples of premiums already sold to anchor tenants include shaving.club, which is launching today, as well as beauty.club, makeup.club and skincare.club, which were all sold to Mary Kay Cosmetics and are expected to launch at a later date.
.CLUB has previously predicted that it would beat .guru (currently at 54,616 names) in the first week and that it would sell five million names in the first five years.
The first aspiration seemed, to me, plausible. I’ve had countless arguments about whether the second is too.

Wikipedia to get single-letter .wiki domain

Top Level Design has scored a bit of a coup for its forthcoming .wiki gTLD — Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, has signed up as an anchor tenant.
According to the registry, Wikimedia will use w.wiki as a URL shortener and they’re in talks about other domains.
The company has also applied to ICANN to release hundreds of two-letter language codes that the foundation wants to use for language-specific short links.
The deal is reminiscent of .CO Internet’s launch, when it allocated the now-ubiquitous t.co for Twitter’s in-house URL shortener, giving it a much-needed marketing boost.
The deal for two-letter domains stands only a slim chance of of being ready in time for .wiki’s general availability, scheduled for May 26, in my view.
Under ICANN’s standard Registry Agreement, all two-character strings are blocked, in order to avoid clashes with country codes used in the ccTLD naming schema.
Top Level Design has now used the Registry Services Evaluation Process to try to get 179 two-letter strings, each of which represents a language code, unblocked.
Wikimedia explicitly endorses the proposal, in a letter attached to the March 11 RSEP (pdf)
The organization plans to use domains such as fr.wiki to redirect to French-language Wikipedia pages and so forth.
It remains to be seen whether ICANN will approve the request. It’s previously been envisaged that registries would approach each country individually to have its ccTLD’s matching string released.
Top Level Design points out that the strings it wants unblocked are from the ISO 639-1 language codes list, not the ISO 3166-1 lists from which ccTLD names are drawn.
But it’s a bit of an argument to nowhere — the strings are identical in most cases.
Under the RSEP policy, Top Level Design really should have been given a preliminary determination by now. It filed its request March 11 but it was only posted last week.
The clock, which gives ICANN 15 days to give the nod or not, may have only just started.
After the preliminary determination, there would be a public comment period and a board of directors decision. The timetable for this would not allow .wiki to launch with the two-letter names active.
But even with the delay, it seems that the registry will be coming out of the door with at least one strong anchor tenant, which is something most new gTLDs have so far failed to manage.

Cowley quits Nominet

Lesley Cowley has unexpectedly quit her job as Nominet’s longstanding CEO.
The .uk registry today announced that she will leave the company July 9, and that the remaining C-suite will manage the company until a replacement is found.
No reason for Cowley’s departure was given, beyond Cowley saying “it is now the right time to move on”.
It’s not known if she has a new gig already lined up. She’s believed to have applied for the ICANN CEO job a couple of times, but that spot isn’t currently vacant.
Cowley has been with Nominet for 15 years and was appointed CEO in 2002.
A small but vocal group of Nominet members has been trying to get her kicked out for the last few years, alleging among other things that she lied to members.
Nominet tells me Cowley’s resignation has nothing to do with that.

Millions spent on new gTLDs as 11 auctions settled

New gTLD portfolio applicants settled at least 11 new gTLD contention sets last week, sharing the spoils of a private auction that looks to have totaled seven figures in sales.
Applicant Auction carried out auctions for 13 contested strings last week, which I believe lasted at least three days.
I’ve been able to determine that Donuts won six sets, Uniregistry won three and Minds + Machines won two. Radix seems to have lost at least five auctions, walking away with a great big pile of cash instead.

.hosting — Uniregistry won after Radix (which owns .host) withdrew.
.click — Uniregistry beat Radix.
.property — Uniregistry won after withdrawals from M+M and Donuts.
.yoga — M+M won, beating Donuts and Uniregistry.
.garden — M+M beat Donuts and Uniregistry again.
.娱乐 — Donuts won this string (Chinese for “.entertainment”) after Morden Media withdrew.
.deals — Donuts beat M+M and Radix.
.city — Donuts beat TLD Registry and Radix.
.forsale — Donuts beat DERForsale.
.world — Donuts beat Radix.
.band — Donuts beat What Box?

Minds + Machines disclosed this morning that the four auctions in which it was involved cost it $5.97 million.
It’s not possible to work out how much .garden and .yoga cost the company; the $5.97 million figure is net of the money it won by losing .property and .deals, ICANN refunds and auctioneer commissions.
However, it seems reasonable to assume that the average price of a gTLD, even not particularly attractive ones (.garden? Really?), has sharply risen from the $1.33 million I calculated from the first 14 auctions.
In January, M+M raised roughly $33.6 million for auctions with a private share placement. The company is listed on London’s Alternative Investment Market.
The company said it now has an interest in 28 uncontested applications.
Also today, the Canadian Real Estate Association withdrew its Community application for .mls, but this is not believed to be related to the auctions. It has a non-Community application for the same string remaining.

Oops! TLD Registry over-reports first-day figures

TLD Registry’s first hours of Chinese IDN gTLD registrations were not as big as previously reported.
We reported earlier today that .在线 (“.online”) and .中文网 (“.chinesewebsite”) had made it to 54,011 names and 38,838 names respectively, just one hour after the 1300 UTC general availability.
However, a few hours later the company told us it had accidentally included thousands of registry-reserved names in those totals.
The actual numbers are 33,012 for .在线 and 17,537 for .中文网, as of 1900 UTC.
These are still extremely impressive numbers, and .在线 is still the biggest launch to date, surpassing the 31,645 with which .berlin ended its first day of GA a month ago.
That gTLD is likely to end the day in third or fourth place in the new gTLD league table, depending on how .photography (with 33,489 names this morning) performed today.
.guru’s crown remains.
Both sets of new numbers include sunrise, landrush and up to 10,000 names registered to the Chinese government under a special pre-release deal the registry negotiated, but they do not include reserved names.

Chinese “.online” beats .guru in one hour

The Chinese new gTLD .在线, which means “.online” has become the biggest new gTLD launch to date, taking tens of thousands of registrations in its first hour of general availability.
According to TLD Registry, which took .在线 and .中文网 (“.chinesewebsite”) to GA at 1300 UTC today, .在线 had 54,011 names and .中文网 had 38,838 names just one hour later.
UPDATE: These numbers were wrong.
That immediately puts .在线 at the top of the new gTLD leaderboard, a clear 1,500 names ahead of Donuts’ .guru (52,428 as of 0100 UTC), which has topped the chart for the last few months.
It took .guru, which launched January 29, 78 days to hit 50,000 names.
With its 38,838 names, .中文网 takes the number four position behind .guru and .berlin.
“As of the last minute before GA, the total number of domains in Dot Chinese Online (.在线) totalled 9,803, and the total number of domains in Dot Chinese Website (.中文网) totalled 8,623,” TLD Registry marketing director Simon Cousins told DI, citing numbers provided by back-end provider Afilias.
The company had allocated 20,452 names, split evenly between the two TLDs, to the Chinese government.
It also auctioned off several dozen names with Sedo at an event in Macau last month.
One of these, a real estate site at 房地产.在线, which means “realestate.online” has already gone live.