Will anyone buy .luxury names?

The new gTLD .luxury went into general availability this afternoon, having reported a surprisingly promising sunrise period, but will it attract any interest from early-bird registrants?
The gTLD’s names are priced at roughly $700 retail, regardless of name, which is usually high enough to deter many professional domainers. This should mean volumes on day on will be low.
But the registry, Luxury Partners, reckons it had over 600 sunrise registrations — made mostly by recognized luxury brands — which it said made it the biggest new gTLD sunrise to date.
Does that show demand by luxury brands, as the registry posits, or merely targeted defensive registration strategies by companies that feel a particular affinity with the “luxury” tag?
The registry said in a press release:

While most registrants expressed interest in securing their brand name under .LUXURY, the namespace also holds great appeal to companies and investors wanting to secure premium generic terms to target specific market verticals within the luxury sector.

For a high-priced name, it’s also got a surprising amount of registrar support. I count something like 50 accredited registrars listed on its nic.luxury web site.
GA started at 1500 UTC today. If the registry approves our request for zone file access we’ll have its day one numbers tomorrow.

.club pips .berlin to #2 spot

.CLUB Domains moved into the number two spot on the new gTLD league table overnight, but its growth appears to be slowing.
In today’s zone files, .club has 47,362 domains under management, having added 734 on Sunday; .berlin stood at 47,243, having added 33 yesterday.
.guru still leads with 56,813 names.
Sunday is typically a slow day for domain registrations across the industry, but .club’s growth does appear to be slowing compared to its first few days of general availability, regardless.
It saw 1,141 net new names on Friday and 1,351 on Saturday. The previous Friday and Saturday adds were at 4,904 and 3,828.
It’s difficult to get a comprehensive picture of daily growth due to the registry missing a few days of zone files last week.

Amazon’s bid for .amazon is dead

ICANN has killed off Amazon’s application for the new gTLD .amazon, based on longstanding but extremely controversial advice from its Governmental Advisory Committee.
According to a New gTLD Program Committee resolution passed on Wednesday and published last night, the applications for .amazon and Chinese and Japanese translations “should not proceed”.
That basically means all three applications are frozen until Amazon withdraws them, wins some kind of appeal, manages to change the GAC’s mind, or successfully sues.
Here’s the last bit of the resolution:

Resolved (2014.05.14.NG03), the NGPC accepts the GAC advice identified in the GAC Register of Advice as 2013-07-18-Obj-Amazon, and directs the President and CEO, or his designee, that the applications for .AMAZON (application number 1-1315-58086) and related IDNs in Japanese (application number 1-1318-83995) and Chinese (application number 1-1318-5581) filed by Amazon EU S.à r.l. should not proceed. By adopting the GAC advice, the NGPC notes that the decision is without prejudice to the continuing efforts by Amazon EU S.à r.l. and members of the GAC to pursue dialogue on the relevant issues.

The NGPC noted that it has no idea why the GAC chose to issue consensus advice against .amazon, but based its deliberations on the mountain of correspondence sent by South American nations.
Peru and Brazil, which share the Amazonia region of the continent, led the charge against the bids, saying they would “prevent the use of this domain for the purposes of public interest related to the protection, promotion and awareness raising on issues related to the Amazon biome”.
Amazon had argued that “Amazon” is not a geographic term and that it was against international law for governments to intervene and prevent it using its trademark.
ICANN commissioned a legal analysis that concluded that the organization was under no legal obligation to either reject or accept the applications.
Under the rules of the new gTLD program, the NGPC could have rejected the GAC’s advice, which would have led to a somewhat lengthy consultation process to resolve (or not) their differences.
The big question now is what Amazon, which has invested heavily in the new gTLD program, plans to do next.
A Reconsideration Request would be the simplest option for appeal, though almost certainly a futile gesture. An Independent Review Process complaint might be slightly more realistic.
There’s always the courts, though all new gTLD applicants have to sign legal waivers when they apply.
A fourth option would be for Amazon to negotiate with the affected governments in an attempt to get the GAC advice reversed. The company has already attempted this — offering to protect certain key words related to the region at the second level, for example — but to no avail.

.club misses first target but hopes to be #1 new gTLD “within days”

.CLUB Domains failed to overtake .guru in its first week of general availability as promised, but the company is nevertheless upbeat about taking the number one spot “within days”.
The last zone file available for .club shows 41,203 names, but that’s the May 14 file. The company, or its back-end, has been having trouble keeping its zone file current in the ICANN system this week.
That was an increase of of 10,523 over five days, or 2,104 per day on average.
As of 1500 UTC yesterday, the company reckoned it had 44,450 sales.
That would still place it at #3 in the league table behind .guru with 56,097 (up 200 names today) and .berlin with 47,079 (up 60 names).
If the growth rates stay roughly the same, .club may well overtake .guru in less than a week.
CEO Colin Campbell told us in March that “I firmly believe that .CLUB will exceed all other new generic top level domains in the first week of launch in registrations and overtake .GURU as the leader.”
The company is hosting a party in New York with celebrity endorser 50 Cent next Thursday (disclosure: I’m attending on .CLUB’s dime) which may or may not lead to a spike.

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.