Donuts looking for accountant with IPO experience

Anyone want to take bets on Donuts’ exit strategy?
The largest new gTLD portfolio applicant has placed a job ad on its web site for an accountant with “Understanding of SEC and/or IPO related accounting”.
That’s SEC for Securities and Exchange Commission and IPO for Initial Public Offering, of course.
It appears IPO experience is a desired quality of the sought-after individual, rather than a must-have, but it seems to point to where Donuts plans to take the company in future.
Donuts of course now has revenue, and it’s been almost two years since it raised its first $100 million venture capital investment in a funding round led by Austin Ventures.
That a VC-backed tech company should be eyeing an eventual IPO should not come as a surprise to anyone — and I wouldn’t expect to see an S-1 any time soon — but it does look like Donuts is already planning for its exit when it comes to its staffing arrangements.
(Thanks to Silver Siwei Wang for the tip).

100 .sexy names reserved by Uniregistry

areyou.sexy? youare.sexy?
If you’re thinking about trying to bag these names when Uniregistry takes .sexy into general availability next week, you’re out of luck — they’re among almost 100 registry-reserved names.
Under ICANN’s standard Registry Agreement, new gTLD registries are allowed to register up to 100 names to themselves “necessary for the operation or promotion of the TLD”.
To date, not many registries appear to have taken advantage of this contractual allowance, but .sexy is one of them.
Uniregistry has mostly reserved fairly standard operational names such as register.sexy, about.sexy, names.sexy and so on, but there are a few interesting choices that hint at possible future services.
Do auctions.sexy and marketplace.sexy hint at moves into the secondary market? Could areyou.sexy be the destination of a future advertising campaign? What are we going to see at build.sexy and pay.sexy?
Here are the names Uniregisty seems to have reserved:

247.sexy, a.sexy, about.sexy, abuse.sexy, account.sexy, areyou.sexy, auction.sexy, auctions.sexy, build.sexy, buy.sexy, cart.sexy, com.sexy, contact.sexy, corp.sexy, create.sexy, dev.sexy, diy.sexy, dom.sexy, domain.sexy, domains.sexy, email.sexy, finance.sexy, find.sexy, free.sexy, get.sexy, geta.sexy, getmy.sexy, help.sexy, home.sexy, host.sexy, hosting.sexy, http.sexy, iwanta.sexy, join.sexy, lease.sexy, legal.sexy, link.sexy, list.sexy, login.sexy, lookup.sexy, mail.sexy, main.sexy, make.sexy, manage.sexy, market.sexy, marketplace.sexy, mobile.sexy, move.sexy, name.sexy, names.sexy, net.sexy, news.sexy, operations.sexy, ops.sexy, partners.sexy, pay.sexy, payment.sexy, pro.sexy, reg.sexy, register.sexy, registera.sexy, registrar.sexy, registrars.sexy, registry.sexy, renew.sexy, rent.sexy, report.sexy, reports.sexy, reserve.sexy, reserved.sexy, s.sexy, search.sexy, secure.sexy, sell.sexy, seo.sexy, sexy.sexy, shop.sexy, signup.sexy, site.sexy, support.sexy, trade.sexy, transfer.sexy, try.sexy, uni.sexy, unireg.sexy, uniregistry.sexy, use.sexy, web.sexy, webmail.sexy, website.sexy, www.sexy, youare.sexy, your.sexy and youre.sexy.

Of particular note: your.sexy, with which Uniregistry seems to acknowledge the declining standards of grammar among the internet-using public, and www.sexy, which seems to be registered and resolving despite appearing on .sexy’s list of must-block name collisions.

PeopleBrowsr tones it down in new .ceo vids

PeopleBrowsr, registry for the forthcoming .ceo gTLD, has eschewed the cringe in its new promotional videos.
No more company employees dancing around in masks to white rap; rather, straightforward animation with a voice-over explaining what .ceo is.
As I was so rude about the first (horrible, horrible) .ceo vid I feel duty bound to embed the latest, relatively boring one, too.

There’s another one here, too.

Are these the 10 most-popular new gTLD domains?

I’m a firm believer that the success of new gTLDs will be measured not just in registration volumes but also in usage, and usage is a lot trickier to measure than domains under management.
One way of measuring usage that’s very familiar to many domainers is Alexa, the Amazon-owned web metrics service that uses toolbars and other data sources to rank web sites by popularity.
This kind of popularity data has been incorporated into TLD Health Check for some time, as one of many means to compare TLDs.
Alexa data isn’t perfect, but it is data, so I thought it might be interesting to see which of the 147 new gTLDs currently in the root are showing up in its daily list of the top one million domains.
There are 10 names, half of which are .guru domains, on yesterday’s list. There are not many functioning web sites yet, but for whatever reason these domains all, according to Alexa, have traffic.
These are the domains, with their popularity rank in parentheses:
www.link (356,406)
The highest-ranking new gTLD domain on our list is actually banned by ICANN due to the purported risk of name collisions.
It’s reserved by Uniregistry and will not resolve or be made available for registration for the foreseeable future.
I think what we’re looking at here is a case of somebody (or more likely lots of people) using www.link in web pages when they really should be using example.com.
beatport.singles (538,603)
Possible cybersquatting? Beatport (I’m old and unhip enough that I had to Google it) is an online electronic music store and the domain is registered via Go Daddy’s Domains By Proxy service.
The domain presumably refers to music “singles” rather than marital status, but it doesn’t seem to resolve from where I’m sitting. Quite why it’s getting traffic is beyond me. A typo in a URL somewhere? IP lawyers?
gtu.guru (589,205)
The first resolving name on our list leads to a work-in-progress Blogger blog. It’s registered to a chap in Gujarat, India, leading me to infer that GTU is Gujarat Technological University. Another squat?
seo.guru (671,647)
The first domainer on the list, I believe. The guy who registered seo.guru paid roughly $2,500 for it during Donuts’ first Early Access Program. It’s currently parked at Go Daddy.
I’d hazard a guess that it’s on the list because it’s a dream URL for an SEO professional (or charlatan, take your pick) and SEOs checking its availability are much more likely to have the Alexa toolbar installed.
deals.guru (790,778)
This one resolves to an under construction page.
I’d speculate that the pre-release $8,100 sale of deals.xyz caused a lot of domainers to check out whether the same second-level was available in other new gTLDs, spiking its traffic and causing an Alexa appearance.
nic.club (796,727)
The only registry-owned domain on our list — nic.club is the official registry web site of .CLUB Domains, which has its .club gTLD in sunrise until the end of March.
Is its appearance on the list indicative of strong pre-launch marketing or something else?
beekeeping.guru (857,778)
I’m not making this stuff up. This domain belongs to a British pest control company but resolves to a default Apache page. I can’t begin to guess why it’s getting traffic.
cp.wien (864,800)
An unregistered name in a sunrise gTLD. Possible name collision?
shop.camera (873,146)
Hot dang, we have a web site!
The domain shop.camera was only registered 10 days ago, but it already leads to what appears to be a fully-functioning Amazon affiliate site, complete with “Shop.Camera” branding.
freebitcoin.guru (994,404)
An email-gathering affiliate marketing site that I personally wouldn’t touch with yours. Still, it looks quite slick compared to the others on the list and it appears that the owner has made some effort to promote it.

CentralNic gets its foot in the door as Famous Four back-end

New gTLD portfolio applicant Famous Four Media has selected CentralNic to provide back-end registry services, joining existing providers ARI Registry Services and Neustar.
CentralNic will be “a preferred provider” of Domain Venture Partners, which is the parent company of Famous Four’s 60 new gTLD applicants, according to a joint statement issued by the companies today.
Neither firm wanted to give any firm details about how CentralNic fits into Famous Four’s strategy, such as whether CentralNic might replace existing back-ends as it did with 27 formerly GMO Registry bids.
Famous Four is already partnered with Neustar on 52 new gTLD applications and ARI on five more.
DVP chief operating officer Charles Melvin told DI in a statement:

CentralNic will sit as one of our preferred backend technology partners. We are in the process of agreeing terms with a limited number of select providers to sit on our preferred panel. Until such agreements have been put in place it would be inappropriate for us to comment on them.

The deal is related to DVP II, an investment vehicle through which DVP hopes to raise up to $400 million “to acquire Top-Level Domain registries, some of which are already live.”
We were leaked a copy of a June 2013 investor presentation related to DVP II, in which the company said its back-end partner had “the lowest fees in the industry”.
With its new “preferred panel”, it looks like the company is hedging its bets.

NCC buys .trust new gTLD from Deutsche Post

NCC Group, owner of .secure applicant Artemis, has bought the rights to .trust from Deutsche Post, which has an uncontested bid for the new gTLD but decided it doesn’t want it.
The price tag of the deal was not disclosed.
NCC, which is also one of the two major data escrow providers supporting new gTLD applicants, said in a statement:

Deutsche Post originally obtained the gTLD through ICANN’s new gTLD allocation process during 2013 but has now chosen not to utilise it.
NCC Group will use .trust as the primary vehicle for launching its Artemis internet security service, which aims to create global internet safety through a secure and trusted environment for selected customers.
The Group remains in the contention stage with its application to ICANN for the .secure gTLD. It believes that there will be a benefit in having a number of complementary named gTLDs, all of which offer the same high levels of internet security.

While Artemis has applied for .secure, it’s facing competition from the much richer Amazon.
Its initial hope that Amazon’s bid would be rejected due to the controversy over “closed generics” seems to have been dashed after Amazon was allowed to change its application.
NCC may be characterizing .trust as an “additional” security TLD, but it’s quite possible it will be its “only” one.
Deutsche Post, which as owner of DHL is the world’s largest courier service, has passed Initial Evaluation on .trust but has not yet signed its ICANN contract.
ICANN’s web site still shows Deutsche Post as the applicant for .trust and it’s not clear from NCC’s statement how the transfer would be handled.

ARI parent goes all surfer dude with rebranding

AusRegistry Group, parent of new gTLD back-end ARI Registry Services, has rebranded itself Bombora Technologies.
The change, which comes with a new web site, is said to reflect AusRegistry’s corporate evolution and not necessarily a reflection of its growing internationalization.
The rebranding does not affect ARI (aka AusRegistry International) or .au ccTLD provider AusRegistry itself, which both keep their names and remain subsidiaries of Bombora.
A third, new company, ZOAK, will take on the software consulting work previously performed under the other brands.
The name Bombora is apparently Australian Aboriginal, describing waves crashing over a shallow reef, that has been adopted into surf culture.
With the rebranding comes a not inconsiderable amount of corporate marketing guff, such as the wealth of gigglesome head-scratchers over on the company’s Belief System page. One example:

Our success is a collection of inspired significance defined by our teams. Your success symbolises a state of mind that forever challenges the status quo and works at building a better alternative.

Reading that, you’d be forgiven for wondering whether plain-speaking CEO Adrian Kinderis had been kicked out. But no, he’s apparently still in charge of Bombora and its subsidiaries.

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 /]