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Was .xxx’s launch disappointing?

Kevin Murphy, December 8, 2011, Domain Registries

The weekend box office numbers are in, and .xxx didn’t put as many bums on seats as might have been expected.
ICM Registry sold 55,367 new .xxx domain names in its first 24 hours of general availability, giving it a total of almost 159,351 registrations, according to the company.
That’s pretty good going for a TLD which, despite the spin in ICM’s recent TV commercials, is intended for a limited customer base, and which is selling for $80 to $100 a year.
Given its $60 registry fee, ICM will have taken over $3.3 million in revenue yesterday, over $550,000 of which will be given to its sponsoring organization, IFFOR.
However, the 159,351 total includes non-resolving domains, ICM has confirmed.
Due to the unique trademark protection mechanisms put in place for non-porn companies, it’s possible to pay for a .xxx domain that will only ever resolve to a standard registry placeholder.
ICM has previously said that it took almost 80,000 sunrise applications, and that the landrush phase put its total “comfortably over 100,000”.
It did not, however, break out the mix of Sunrise A (resolving) and Sunrise B (non-resolving) domains.
That’s an important distinction, both for ICM’s ongoing revenue and for gauging demand for .xxx among registrants.
Each Sunrise B domain gave ICM a $161 windfall but, unlike every other TLD launched to date, has the sale had no recurring revenue component.
I think it’s possible that 50,000 to 60,000 sunrise domains were non-resolvers, which would give .xxx a total of roughly 100,000 active domains under management after one day of GA.
(My assumptions are that all 80,000 sunrise applications were unique and approved, and that roughly two thirds were for Sunrise B non-resolving domains).
Assuming all the active domains are renewed, it’s a $6 million a year business (or $5 million, if you exclude the mandatory IFFOR donation) for ICM already.
The .xxx zone is already bigger than .travel, .pro, .jobs, .aero, .coop, .museum and .cat. It will likely be bigger than .name, .tel and .asia by the end of the month.
So why suggest that it’s a disappointing result?
Pre-reservations
First, for a few years ICM was accepting no-cost .xxx “pre-reservations” through its web site, while its gTLD application was in ICANN limbo.
It racked up over 900,000 such reservations for roughly 650,000 unique .xxx domain names before shutting the offer down in July this year.
One might expect that most people interested enough in .xxx to pre-register a domain months or years in advance might also be interested in grabbing that domain during landrush, sunrise or at the moment of GA. That apparently didn’t happen.
.CO
Let’s also compare .xxx to the launch of .co by .CO Internet last year.
While .CO did not have anything like the long-term media exposure as .xxx, it did of course have the advantage of offering a completely generic string priced at a third of .xxx.
Within its first 24 hours of general availability, .CO said that it had 233,000 domains under management, about 39,000 of which were landrush or sunrise registrations.
Even at the cheaper registry fee (about $20 a year) .CO still made more money in day one than ICM (although ICM wins hands-down in terms of premium domain sales).
.CO, incidentally, also only had 10 accredited registrars at launch (not counting resellers) compared to ICM’s over 70.
Go Daddy
Go Daddy is responsible for roughly half of all new .com registrations, with similar numbers in other TLDs including .co, but it does not appear to be promoting .xxx very heavily.
For the last few days, its homepage has contained only one small below-the-fold reference to .xxx domains. Its TLD drop-down menu has .xxx in tenth place, between .biz and .ca.
Conversely, ICM has been promoting Go Daddy (and DomainMonster) more heavily in its own marketing – notably on gavin.xxx, the site “owned” by its TV commercial character.
Expectations
So is .xxx on track to meet expectations at this early stage?
ICM CEO Stuart Lawley has previously predicted 300,000 to 500,000 registrations in the first few months, and that’s still an achievable goal given its day-one performance.
.CO Internet, for example, more than doubled its 233,000 first-day take within two months of going into general availability.
The new Russian ccTLD .рф registered 200,000 domains in its first six hours when it launched in November 2010, and hit 800,000 by April this year.
While .xxx clearly hasn’t yet smashed estimates in the same way as its sunrise did, I think early indications are that it’s looking pretty healthy.

Blah blah ICM blah .xxx blah blah…

Kevin Murphy, December 6, 2011, Domain Registries

Today blah blah ICM Registry blah blah .xxx blah live blah.
Blah blah 10 years blah blah porn blah blah generally available blah. Blah delay blah 5pm blah Lawley blah.
ICANN blah blah Governmental Advisory Committee blah blah blah San Francisco blah blah blah.
Blah blah Free Speech Coalition blah blah controversy blah Manwin blah blah blah lawsuit blah antitrust blah blah blah leg to stand on.
Blah speculators blah domainers blah cybersquatters blah. Blah blah shirt off your back blah.
Blah blah contract blah blah policies blah blah UDRP blah toothless blah blah blah WIPO blah blah blah donkey porn.
Blah reporting blah damned blah story blah 10 years blah blah bored blah blah blah blah finally over.
Blah blah blah.

YouPorn imposes embargo on .xxx sites

Kevin Murphy, December 4, 2011, Domain Registries

Manwin, the company behind YouPorn, has stepped up its fight against ICM Registry by saying it will not do business with any .xxx web site.
Reported in the adult press this weekend, the ban seems to extend to webmasters hoping to promote their sites on Manwin’s “tube” sites, including YouPorn.
It also won’t allow its content to be used on .xxx sites, according to Xbiz.
Manwin is of course already suing ICM and ICANN under US monopoly laws, and has demanded an ICANN independent review, claiming the .xxx launch amounted to “extortion”.
The domain YouPorn.xxx is currently on ICM’s Registry Reserved list, meaning it was not acquired during sunrise and will not become available when .xxx opens its doors on Tuesday.
YouPorn is one of the web’s top 100 sites, according to Alexa.

The world’s newest TLD – ICANN approves .sx

Kevin Murphy, December 2, 2011, Domain Registries

ICANN’s board of directors has finally approved .sx, the new country-code top-level domain for newly autonomous Dutch territory Sint Maarten.
In an unexpected non-meeting earlier this week, the board voted to delegate .sx to SX Registry, a joint venture of Luxembourg registry startup OpenRegistry and Canadian registrar MediaFusion.
The vote had been delayed from the board’s meeting in October as SX Registry went through the required pre-delegation motions with ICANN’s IANA department.
Sint Maarten was created in October 2010 when the Netherlands Antilles (.an) split into three separate territories.
The ccTLD .cw for Curacao was assigned to the University of the Netherlands Antilles in October this year, but .bq for Bonaire, Saint Eustatius and Saba, has yet to be delegated.
The legacy .an domain is scheduled to be decommissioned before October 2014.

DotGreen hires former Neustar exec

Kevin Murphy, December 2, 2011, Domain Registries

New gTLD applicant DotGreen has tapped former Neustar vice president Tim Switzer to be its new chief operating officer and chief financial officer.
Switzer was vice president of registry services at Neustar. It’s the first example I can recall of a senior exec from a registry services provider joining a single-gTLD applicant.
DotGreen, naturally enough, plans to apply to ICANN for the .green top-level domain next year. It’s a not-for-profit company that hopes to channel funds into environment projects.

European ccTLDs liberalize policies

Kevin Murphy, November 30, 2011, Domain Registries

Afnic, the .fr registry, will adopt new policies next week enabling organizations from outside of France to register domain names for the first time.
Under the rule change, entities in European Union countries, as well as Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland, will qualify for .fr names.
The new policy (pdf), which comes into effect December 6, also applies to .re, the ccTLD for the French terrirtory Réunion, which Afnic also manages.
The registry is also discontinuing a handful of second-level domains which were previously available for third-level registration by the public.
Existing domains in .com.fr, ..tm.fr, .asso.fr, .asso.re, and .com.re will continue to function, but Afnic will no longer accept new registrations in these extensions.
Elsewhere in Europe, the Norwegian registry Norid liberalized its registration policies this morning, raising its ownership cap from 20 to 100 domain names per registrant.
Evidently anticipating a possible increase in cybersquatting disputes as a result, Norid has said it has also instituted a loser pays model for its dispute resolution process.

Russian registry to apply for “.children”

Kevin Murphy, November 28, 2011, Domain Registries

The Russian .ru domain name registry has announced plans to apply for .ДЕТИ, the Russian word for “.children”, under ICANN’s new generic top-level domains program.
It’s the first public announcement of a top-level internationalized domain name that is not geographic nor a transliteration of an existing TLD.
Coordination Center for TLD RU, the registry, said that the initiative was inspired by the success of .РФ (.rf), which is on track to register its millionth domain before the end of the year.
Registry CEO Andrey Kolesnikov said in a statement: “We kicked off preparations for the applying for another top-level domain – .ДЕТИ, which should for an Internet space reserved exclusively for the youngest users.”
IDN gTLDs are one of the benefits of the new gTLD program that nobody — not even trademark interests — disputes, but until now there were no “proper” examples to cite.
VeriSign and Afilias have already announced plans for IDN versions of their existing gTLDs – .com, .net and .info – and ICANN has approved IDN ccTLDs for a couple dozen nations.

Nominet approves .judiciary.uk

Kevin Murphy, November 23, 2011, Domain Registries

Nominet has approved a request to clutter up the second level under .uk with another government-oriented domain, .judiciary.uk, bringing the total number of SLDs to 15.
As you may know, the UK equivalent of .com is .co.uk, but there are other suffixes such as .org.uk, .me.uk, .plc.uk, .ltd.uk and .net.uk, each with varying restrictions.
There are also several SLDs reserved for public sector use: .gov.uk, .police.uk, .nhs.uk (National Health Service), .sch.uk (schools), .ac.uk (universities) .mod.uk (Ministry of Defence) and .parliament.uk.
The new .judiciary.uk will of course be closed, restricted to the institutions of the UK judiciary. Nominet is proposing to migrate affected registrants from their existing .gov.uk domains.
“Creating judiciary.uk will ensure that the domain name reflects the judiciary’s independence from government, as enshrined in the Constitutional Reform Act, 2005,” Nominet said.
The request was made by the Judicial Office and the Cabinet Office and “due to the unique nature of the request” did not follow the usual Nominet policy for SLD creation.

GMO wins .tokyo deal

Kevin Murphy, November 21, 2011, Domain Registries

GMO Registry says it has won local government backing to apply to ICANN for the city top-level domain .tokyo.
The company revealed the news on its Twitter feed today, linking to this Tokyo metropolitan government announcement confirming the story.
While perhaps best-known for its planned .shop application, GMO is probably the registry services company with the most announced new gTLD back-end contract wins to date.
It is also on board to provide the registry for the Japanese regional gTLDs .okinawa and .ryukyu, as well as the brand gTLDs .hitachi and .canon. It already runs Somalia’s .so and Indonesia’s .id ccTLDs.
GMO Registry parent GMO Internet is a pretty big deal in its native Japan. Publicly listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, it has annual revenue of well over half a billion dollars.

Joint venture bids for Aussie city gTLDs

Kevin Murphy, November 21, 2011, Domain Registries

Cloud Registry, CoCCA and Sedari have teamed up to bid for the proposed Australian city top-level domains .melbourne and .sydney.
Sedari announced today that it has responded to the recently closed requests from proposals, which were opened by the state governments of New South Wales and Victoria a month ago.
The bid would see Cloud Registry operate the registry back-end itself, with Sedari handling back-office functions such as the ICANN contracts. CoCCA is on board for its country-code TLD experience.
While Sedari is UK-based, the venture has links to the continent.
CoCCA is based in New Zealand and has a NOC in Sydney, Cloud Registry is based in Sydney, and Sedari founder Liz Williams was once a board member of .au administrator auDA.
While no other firms have announced bids, you can expect that the usual suspects in the registry service provider market will have also applied.
I’d be surprised if local firm ARI Registry Services (formerly AusRegistry International), whose parent runs .au, is not a strong contender.