Donuts explains its premium pricing strategy

Add Donuts to the list of registries planning to use .tv-style variable pricing after their new gTLDs start to go to general availability next year.
COO Richard Tindal told DI last night that each of its upcoming registries could have “two, three, four, five, six — it varies — levels of buy-it-now pricing”.
He was referring to pricing during general availability, not any of Donuts’ special launch phases.
The actual number of registry-reserved names held for auction or future promotional purposes is likely to be quite small — often under 20 names per TLD — Tindal said.
Instead, Donuts wants to get the names it has identified as “premium” to market as quickly as possible, but with a higher annual price than the base registry fee. He said:

Let’s take .clothing, that’s coming out at the moment.
There’ll be a small — very small — number of reserved names for which we may do an auction later
The vast, vast majority of the names are first-come-first-served buy-it-now — but within Donuts TLDs, at more than one price within a TLD.
So in .clothing the standard names will be one price, then there’ll be another group of names that are premium for a higher price, and another group of names that are higher still that are premiums as well, and potentially even another group.

Tindal didn’t want to give specifics, but indicated that most premiums could carry an annual fee of under $1,000.
“Your ball-park standard name is a $10, $20, $30 name, ish, retail,” he said. “And your premium name is in the hundreds of dollars a year, typically. It varies.”
“Generally, ball-park-speaking, the vast majority of our names will be well, well under $1,000 a year,” he said.
He added that the tiers should be obvious when pre-registering names at one of Donuts’ accredited registrars.
I experimented a bit on 101domain, where the base retail price for a .clothing domain is currently $34.99 a year.
I found that used.clothing and winter.clothing, for example, both carry a $400 price tag, hot.clothing and large.clothing are $49.50 each, while vintage.clothing and designer.clothing appear to be reserved.
Those are the retail prices, of course, which include the registrar’s mark-up. While they’re for pre-registered names, I’m not expecting the GA prices to be much different.
“These are very attractively priced names, in our view, even the premium ones we think are attractive to people,” Tindal said. “We want registrars to make some margin, we want registrants to have room for the value of the name to increase as well.”
He didn’t say how many names will be in the higher pricing tiers — it will vary by gTLD.
“We believe premiums will be a small percentage of names under management,” he said.
The tiers will be the same across all of Donuts TLDs, he said, but each given TLD may only use a subset. So if there are six possible tiers, .example may only use three of them.
Donuts does not currently plan to operate a “founders program” for its gTLDs, Tindal said.
“We just want to get these names out and in the hands of users,” he said. Donuts’ market is primarily small and medium sized enterprises.
Donuts is not the first to reveal tiered pricing for new gTLD names.
Top Level Domain Holdings recently laid out a similar pricing strategy. Its Minds + Machines registrar is already taking pre-registrations on names with renewal fees ranging into many thousands of dollars per yer for premium names.
What Box and Plan Bee have also started selling pre-registrations via their registrars that indicate tiered pricing.
Prior to new gTLDs, the only notable TLD with variable pricing was Verisign’s repurposed ccTLD, .tv.

Prince Charles first to get a second-level .uk name

The household of Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales, has become one of the first bodies to receive a second-level .uk domain name, Nominet announced this morning.
The name princeofwales.uk was among four delegated to organizations that have previously used third-level .gov.uk names but which are actually independent of the UK government. Nominet said:

Nominet has delegated the new second-level .uk domain names royal.uk, princeofwales.uk, supremecourt.uk and jcpc.uk to the Royal Household, the Household of the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, the Supreme Court, and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council respectively.

These were among 69 second-level names requested by the British government for special treatment in advance of the broader Direct.uk initiative, which is due to kick of mid-2014.
The full list of government names will be published in February, Nominet said.
Under Direct.uk, registrants of .co.uk names will get five years to decide whether they want to register the matching .uk name.

The latest new gTLD passes and signings

Five new gTLD applications passed Extended Evaluation late Friday, while one more contract was signed.
Four of the five EE passes were dot-brands that had previously failed to provide ICANN with enough financial information to pass their Initial Evaluation.
They are: .mckinsey (McKinsey Holdings), .alcon (Alcon Laboratories), .cipriani (Hotel Cipriani), and .jcp (JCP Media).
The fifth was DotHome Ltd (Defender Security/CGR-Ecommerce) with .home, a bittersweet pass given that the .home gTLD is now unlikely to ever see the light of day due to name collision risks.
Also late Friday, another registry signed its Registry Agreement with ICANN. This time, it was Dai Nippon Printing with .dnp, a Japanese dot-brand.
The contract has not yet been published, but it seems unlikely to be ICANN’s newly proposed dot-brand contract, which is still open for public comment.

Blocked trademarks still eligible for Donuts sunrises

Donuts has confirmed that it is to allow trademark owners to participate in its new gTLD Sunrise periods even if their marks appear on name collisions block-lists.
The decision means that companies will be able to choose whether to grab names matching their marks during Sunrise, or take the risk that they will be released at a later date.
Donuts, like all gTLD registries, has been given block-lists for each of its TLDs. The idea is to avoid collisions with names already in use on private name-spaces behind corporate firewalls.
Lots of these blocked names match or contain well-known trademarks.
(Trademark owners can use the DI PRO collisions search engine to figure out which gTLDs have been asked to block their marks.)
While this appears at first glance to be good news for mark owners that just want their marks blocked in as many TLDs as possible, it also poses potential risks.
Blocked names are not likely to be blocked until after the first wave of Sunrise periods are over, and ICANN’s unblocking process has not yet been written.
For a company that wants to register its brand in a new gTLD, but is on a block-list, that could cause problems.
By allowing companies to participate in Sunrise regardless, Donuts is giving them a way to mitigate the risk of somebody else grabbing their brands in future.
Donuts does not plan to allow any of these names to be activated in the DNS until the ICANN collisions mitigation plan has been finalized, however.
So companies could find themselves paying for Sunrise names but unable to use them until some unspecified future date — if at all.

Ten more new gTLDs get ICANN contracts

.bar, .pub, .fish, .actor, .caravan, .saarland, .yokohama, .ren, .eus and .рус all have new gTLD contracts with ICANN as of yesterday.
It’s an eclectic batch of TLDs. Unusually, only one belongs to Donuts.
Of note is .caravan, which on the face of it looks like an English-language generic, but which is actually a closed, single-registrant dot-brand.
While “caravan” is an English dictionary word in the UK and Australasia, in the US it’s a 50-year-old trademark belonging to Illinois-based applicant Caravan International.
The Governmental Advisory Committee never flagged up .caravan as a “closed generic” in its Beijing Communique, so ICANN never questioned how it would be used.
However, the application states that the company plans “to reserve all names within the TLD to itself”.
What we seem to have here is a case of a dictionary word in one part of the world being captured by a single-registrant applicant due to a trademark elsewhere.
Another notable new Registry Agreement signatory is Punto 2012, which has obtained a contract for .bar.
The gTLD was originally contested, but Demand Media’s United TLD withdrew following an RFP held by the government of Montenegro, which had an effective veto over the string “Bar” due to a match with the protected name of one of its administrative regions.
I gather Montenegro will be paid in some way from the .bar registry pot.
There are also a few new geographic/cultural registries this week: .eus for the Basque people of Spain, .yokohama for a Japanese city, .saarland for a German state and the Cyrillic IDN .рус for a subset of the Russian people.
The only .brand is .ren, for the Chinese social network Renren.
The remainder are English-language generics.

GAC kills off two more new gTLD bids

A new gTLD applicant has withdrawn two of its Chinese-language applications after failing to secure the necessary government support.
Guangzhou YU Wei Information Technology Co withdrew its applications for .深圳 (.shenzhen) and .广州 (.guangzhou).
Both are the names of very large cities in southern China.
The ICANN Governmental Advisory Committee had previously issued official Advice against both bids.
The applicant had failed to get a passing score on its Initial Evaluation earlier this year, with ICANN ruling that governmental “support or non-objection was either not provided or did not meet the criteria”.
To get a geographic gTLD, you need to prove local government support, something which the applicant seems to have been unable to provide during Extended Evaluation.
Weirdly, Guangzhou YU Wei has previously passed EE for .佛山 (.foshan) and IE for .广东 (.guangdong), which are both also Chinese geographic names.

German geo .ruhr enters the root

Verisign today delegated the new gTLD .ruhr to the DNS root zone, making it the 35th new gTLD to go live.
It’s a geographic string, meant for residents of the north-west German region of Ruhr, operated by Regiodot.
nic.ruhr is already resolving.
Regiodot is already taking pre-registrations via approximately 10 signed-up registrars, which all appear to operate in German-speaking countries.
The Ruhr (in German, it’s short for Ruhrgebiet) has over eight million inhabitants, according to Wikipedia, making the potential market for .ruhr larger than many European ccTLDs.

ICANN floats new rules for dot-brands

Dot-brand gTLDs could get big exemptions to the standard new gTLD Registry Agreement under new rules published for public comment by ICANN over the weekend.
The proposed changes were negotiated by ICANN and the Brand Registry Group, a coalition of dot-brand applicants that one day plans to become a formal part of ICANN’s policy-making structure.
“The changes will allow trademark owners who have applied for new TLDs to promote and maintain trust in their .Brand registries,” the BRG said in a statement supporting the changes.
Dot-brands would be completely exempt from the standard Code of Conduct, which requires registries to treat all accredited registrars equally.
They’d be explicitly allowed to work with only one trusted registrar.
Given that dot-brands are all essentially single-registrants spaces (limited to the brand owner, its affiliates and trademark licensees) it makes sense to eschew the usual competitive registrar market.
Brand owners were also very worried about ICANN’s right to re-delegate defunct gTLDs, including dot-brands, to new registry operators, which could be seen as extreme brand dilution.
So the proposed RA amendment would also prevent ICANN from redelegating dot-brands for two years after the agreement expires, unless there’s a compelling public-interest reason to do so.
If ICANN chose to redelegate during that period, the former dot-brand would be able to object.
Nothing would stop a third party applying for the vacated gTLD in a subsequent application round.
The changes appear to prevent brand registries from claiming exclusive rights to gTLD strings in perpetuity, while still giving them breathing space to wind down and attempt to avoid brand confusion.
The definition of a “brand” seems to have been written in order to prevent gaming by companies with trademarks on generic strings.
To qualify to become a dot-brand, a registry would have to prove that its gTLD string is a trademark it owns for non-domain industry they’re already playing in. Strings starting with dots would be excluded.
ICANN would determine which gTLDs are eligible, and would be able to revoke the dot-brand status if the registry changed its business plans in future.
The proposal has been negotiated by ICANN legal staff and the BRG and has not yet been approved by the New gTLD Program Committee or the ICANN board.
It’s open for public comment until January 31, here.

Oh no! Cement company withdraws dot-brand bid

FLSmidth, a Danish cement company, has withdrawn its application for the new gTLD .fls.
It’s the first dot-brand to be withdrawn from the program in months.
FLSmidth had passed Initial Evaluation and was not facing any objections or Governmental Advisory Committee advice, so it’s not immediately clear why the company decided to pull out.
The company recently reported a fall in profitability, so perhaps it’s just trying to cut costs by eliminating superfluous expenses.

TLDH ditches .roma bid after GAC trouble

Top Level Domain Holdings has withdrawn its bid for the .roma gTLD, after apparently running afoul of the Italian government.
The gTLD was to represent the city of Rome, but Italy issued the company with an Early Warning (pdf) a year ago saying the company had “No involvement or support from the local authorities” and should withdraw.
TLDH disputed this, saying in November 2012:

In fact the Company had engaged extensively with the relevant local authority and will provide supporting documentation to the Italian GAC member. Once this evidence has been submitted, the Directors believe that the objection will be withdrawn.

The warning did not escalate to full-blown Governmental Advisory Committee advice, but .roma nevertheless failed Initial Evaluation (pdf) due to the lack of documented government support with its application.
The bid was eligible for Extended Evaluation, but it seems that TLDH was unable to get the required level of support or non-objection from Italy to allow the bid to pass.
It’s the second of TLDH’s applications to get killed off by a GAC member. It withdrew its non-geo application for .spa as soon as Belgium started making noises about its own city of Spa.
The company also ditched plans to apply for .mumbai in 2011 due to confusion about whether the city’s government actually supported it or not.