M+M sees 200,000 .london names in its future

Minds + Machines CEO Antony Van Couvering reckons the company’s forthcoming .london new gTLD could see as many as 200,000 domains under management, just from small businesses.
He told DI the target is realistic following the results of a YouGov survey of 1,001 London-based small businesses, which found that 26% were “likely” to buy a .london name.
From this, YouGov extrapolated that there are at least 218,140 companies ready to register a .london.
Van Couvering would not put a deadline on hitting the ambitious goal, but said that registry Dot London Domains and M+M as technical provider are “going to do our best to make the launch well-publicized and successful.”
Judging by the gTLD’s official web site, which carries quotes from the likes of Selfridges, the London Eye and Carnaby Street, there’s been a fair bit of outreach to recognizable London brands already.
Dot London backer London & Partners is the Mayor’s office’s official PR agency, so you can imagine there’s going to be some decent marketing resources thrown at marketing.
The .london gTLD is due to launch April 29 this year, according to the registry.
It’s been contracted with ICANN since November 14, so is running well over the average time to delegation of 70 days.

.photography, on day one, becomes second-largest new gTLD

Donuts’ new gTLD .photography has become the second-largest new gTLD after .guru, just a few hours after it hit its regular general availability pricing.
Zone files dated 1840 UTC today show that .photography had 8,878 domains, compared to .guru’s 27,698 and .bike’s 6,524.
That’s just a few hours after .photography finished with its week-long premium-pricing Early Access Program period. By contrast, .bike and .guru finished their EAPs exactly a week ago.
The other six Donuts gTLDs going to regular pricing this afternoon fared less well, with .gallery at 2,869, .estate at 2,465, .equipment at 1,900, .graphics at 1,368, .lighting at 1,338 and .camera at 1,227.
Those are the numbers for about two and a half hours of proper general availability, which will reflect hand-registrations and any pre-registrations that were made over the last few months.
DI PRO subscribers can see the full list of new gTLD zone file counts here.

Delegation wait time varies wildly for new gTLDs

New gTLDs get delegated on average 70 days after they sign their ICANN Registry Agreement, but the duration of the wait varies quite a lot by registry, according to DI research.
For the 145 delegated new gTLDs I looked at, the delegation has come 39 to 151 days after contract signing.
After signing an RA, registries have to enter into Pre-Delegation Testing before their strings are handed off to IANA, Verisign and the US Department of Commerce for delegation.
The Applicant Guidebook states that this transition to delegation phase is expected to take approximately two months. On average, ICANN seems to be only slightly missing that target.
The differing wait times could be attributed to any number of reasons. Difficulties during PDT, registry choice, geography and holidays could all see some take longer than others.
Donuts, which is responsible for almost two thirds of the gTLDs I looked at, seems to have refined the process to an art, getting its gTLDs delegated on average 62 days after contract signing.
There are currently 125 gTLDs that have contracts but have not yet been delegated, according to our records.
Here’s the table of delegation wait times, for those interested.
[table id=27 /]

.photography beating .camera

Who said shorter domains are more popular?
Donuts’ new .photography and .camera gTLDs, which both come out of their Early Access Period premium pricing phases this week, have seen .photography get more than twice as many registrations so far.
During their EAP and sunrise periods, where retail prices can range from $150 to $13,000, .camera has racked up 146 names to .photography’s 383.
There’s a difference of meaning here of course, which is reflected in the types of domains being registered; .camera names tend to be hardware-related, while .photography is heavy with personal names.
Donuts’ strategy of picking strings that already feature heavily at the end of the second level of .com seems to be reflecting the reality of registration patterns in new gTLDs too.
The photography-related gTLD space is going to an interesting one to watch.
We’re also waiting for the launch of .photo and .photos (.photos in two weeks, .photo in April), which will crowd the space further. These two are also likely to be the first plural/singular competitors.

New gTLD domains top 41,000

Donuts’ first seven new gTLDs are still growing at a pretty rapid clip, albeit from a small base, a couple of days after they hit their baseline pricing.
There were 41,880 registered domains in the first eight new gTLDs as of last night’s zone files, half of which belong to .guru.
Some of Donuts’ gTLDs are still growing at 30-40% or thereabouts per day, whereas growth in dotShabaka’s شبكة. seems to be tailing off.
[table id=26 /]
DI PRO subscribers can track daily zone file changes here.

IBM files URS complaints against guy who spent $2,500 on two domains

If you were a cybersquatter, would you spend $2,500 on just two domain names without doing even the most basic research into whether you’d get to keep the names?
One individual from New Jersey has done precisely that, apparently, and has now been hit with what may well be the first new gTLD Uniform Rapid Suspension complaint, according to Donuts.
Donuts VP Mason Cole said in a DI comment today that the company has “been notified of an additional URS action involving two IBM names.”
I believe he’s referring to ibm.guru and ibm.ventures, two new gTLD domains I highlighted earlier today as being registered under Go Daddy’s Whois privacy service.
Privacy protection has since been lifted from both domains, in accordance with Go Daddy policy, revealing the registrant (assuming it’s not a fake name) as one Denis Antipov of New Jersey.
Both domains were redirecting to ibm.com when I checked a few days ago — showing that the registrant clearly had IBM in mind when he bought the names — but now do not resolve for me.
What’s funny is that the registration date of the domains is January 31. Due to Donuts’ Early Access Program, the registrant will have paid Go Daddy a total of $2,479.98 for the pair.
Now, he stands to lose that investment in a URS case that will set IBM back about the same amount.
Donuts’ Cole said: “When infringement is alleged, we want to see the due process tools developed for new TLDs put to use. Registries are not trademark adjudicators — we implement the objective decisions of others.”
UPDATE: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported the price the registrant will have paid for these names.

TMCH sees cybersquatting in 1&1’s pre-reg requests

Would-be cybersquatters have pre-registered new gTLD domains matching many famous brands, according to the Trademark Clearinghouse.
According to a bit of TMCH PR fluff coming out tomorrow, there are pre-registrations in .web for 40 out of the 50 most-valuable British brands.
I gather that the data came from 1&1, the most aggressive registrar in its pursuit of new gTLD leads, which has reported over three million pre-regs.
In what appears to be outreach to drum up additional trademark registrations, the TMCH said:

According to the Trademark Clearinghouse’s data, unknown entities have already pre-reserved their interest in registering the domain names of 80 per cent of the UK’s 50 most valuable under the .WEB domain name. Similarly, third parties have attempted to pre-order 78 per cent of the UK’s top 50 most valuable brands under the .ONLINE domain name, 72 per cent under .APP, 70 per cent under .SHOP and 68 per cent under .BLOG.

It doesn’t seem to be a problem peculiar to new gTLDs, however. The TMCH also said that 54% of these brands have holes in their defensive registration portfolio across existing TLDs such as .biz, .net and .co.
There were roughly 23,000 marks in the TMCH database as of January 21.
UPDATE: 1&1 has asked me to clarify that the company took no part in this research. TMCH says it obtained the numbers through searches on the 1&1 web site.

First eight gTLDs have 26,000 names so far

Well, we now have a new gTLD domain name market.
After n years of debate, policy-making, delay, application, testing, delegation and newfangled launch processes, there are eight new gTLDs that are open for business.
Donuts yesterday opened up its first seven gTLDs to their ‘proper’ general availability — by which I mean landrush pricing is no longer applicable.
At more or less the same time its second seven — .lighting, .equipment, .graphics, .photography, .camera, .estate, and .gallery exited their sunrise periods and went into their Early Access Program.
Meanwhile, dotShabaka Registry’s شبكة. (“.web” in Arabic) came out of its more opaque landrush period with several hundred new registrations.
Together, these 15 gTLDs have 26,199 registrations so far, based on the names active in their zone files today. The eight fully live gTLDs have 25,575, almost half of which belong to Donuts’ .guru.
[table id=25 /]
The zone files are generated at about 0100 UTC and therefore do not represent the full first day of Donuts newly-GA gTLDs, but it’s clear that .guru is the domainer’s favorite so far.
The numbers are a long way off pretty much every new TLD launch we’ve seen to date.
Compare to .mobi, which had over 110,000 names at the end of its first week; .co, which sold 216,159 in its first 16 hours; or .xxx, which sold 55,367 names on day one.
Even Radix said it sold 4,000 .pw names in its first three hours and 50,000 in the first three weeks.
It should also be pointed out that none of the Donuts gTLD numbers include purchases of Domain Protected Marks List blocks, which do not show up in zone files.
That fact eliminates much of the noise from defensive registrations that we see in almost every other TLD.
For buyers (as opposed to blockers) market conditions are obviously different now too — a single TLD launching was once an event, the temporary alleviation of scarcity, whereas today Donuts alone expects to launch half a dozen every week for months.
And the Latin strings that have been launched so far don’t exactly capture the imagination, with .guru the possible exception.
Donuts’ portfolio, in my view, is based more on securing greenfield opportunities in vertical markets (plumbing, cameras, etc) rather than mining domain investors’ wallets on launch day.
One of the keys to the success of these things longer term is going to be how much use they get — when internet users start visiting new gTLD sites and seeing new gTLD URLs on billboards, momentum will build.

Donuts made about $750,000 from landrush so far

Donuts managed to sell well over $500,000 in new gTLD domain names over the first six days of its Early Access Program, according to our calculations.
Our estimate, which is somewhere between back-of-the-envelope and hard analysis, is based on the latest zone files for its first seven live gTLDs — .bike, .clothing, .guru, .ventures, .holdings, .plumbing and .singles.
The exact number I believe is somewhere closer to $750,000, but it’s actually quite difficult to pin down the exact value of domains sold to date due to the complexity of the Donuts pricing scheme.
Zone files show that as of last night Donuts had sold at least 3,650 names across all seven of its new gTLDs currently on the market.
That’s including sunrise sales and the first six days of the novel EAP, which saw buy-now prices decrease every day for a week, but not including its Domain Protected Marks List blocks.
My revenue estimates are for EAP only, ignoring sunrise.
Donuts’ EAP fee started off at $10,000 on January 30, then was reduced to $2,500, $950, $500 and $100 every day. It’s been at $100 for the last few days and will revert to baseline prices tomorrow at 1600 UTC.
So by figuring out the registration date you can figure out how much the name sold for, kinda.
Domain Name Wire managed to establish last week that the company sold six three domains at $10,000.
Based on a few hundred additional Whois look-ups, DI has found that the company sold at least 120 names during EAP at at least $500 each, at least 150 at at least $950, and at least 25 at at least $2,500.
That would bring the total haul for the first few days of EAP fees to about $300,000.
Add all this to roughly $200,000 worth of names that have appeared in the zone files since the fee dropped to $100, and we get to about $500,000 in total EAP fees, not including sunrise names.
Add in the baseline registry fees and you get to something like $550,000.
However, Donuts has also priced many attractive names at a “baseline” premium. That means when regular pricing commences tomorrow, premiums will still cost more than regular names in each TLD.
A registrant told us today that gun.guru will costs him about $400 a year to renew. That’s the baseline price. Judging by the date, he paid $950 in EAP fees and Go Daddy’s registrar markup too.
There’s no way to easily figure out what the premium pricing was after a domain has already been sold, which makes it difficult to calculate Donuts’ landrush windfall, but I believe it’s in the region of $750,000 so far, with a day yet to run.
It’s an estimate of the revenue from EAP’s first six days, only counting first-year fees.
It also requires the same caveats as usual: we’re using zone file data here, which does not present a full picture of the number of names sold.
If the pricing scheme seems confusing to you, you’re not alone.
There wasn’t a great deal of participation by registrars in the EAP, due to concerns about the high prices, implementation work, and complexity causing confusion among customers.

@DomainIncite Mostly because the pricing is confusing to customers. We'll roll them out in search along with other extensions on the 5th.

— Hover CS (@hoverCS) January 29, 2014

@DomainIncite The amount of customization required for the EAP & high cost does not make it feasible to market / implement.

— Lexsynergy Limited (@LexsynergyLtd) January 29, 2014

Several registrars seem to be treating tomorrow’s price drop as the “proper” general availability launch date for the seven gTLDs concerned.
Go Daddy, which has had new gTLDs in its storefront for the last couple months, seems to have got the majority of registrations, as you might expect. Almost a quarter of names appearing in zone files over two days last week were registered via its Domains By Proxy privacy service.
That said, its Super Bowl commercials on Sunday do not appear to have made a significant impact, focused as they were on branding Go Daddy rather than any TLD offering.

Nominet names the date for shorter .uk addresses

Nominet is to start selling .uk domain names at the second level for the first time on June 10 this year.
The controversial Direct.uk service will enable people to register example.uk names, rather than example.co.uk names.
If you already own a .co.uk name, you’ll get five years to register the matching .uk before it is released into the pool of available names.
Nominet has created a new web site to market the sea-change in how .uk names are administered.