Verisign wipes free TLDs from the world stats

The number of domain names registered globally dropped by over 25 million in the first quarter, but only because Verisign has stopped tracking .tk and its free sister ccTLDs in its quarterly estimates.

The latest Domain Name Industry Brief says that 2021 ended with 341.7 million registrations across all TLDs, substantially fewer that the 367.3 million it reported at the end of the third quarter.

But this is only because Verisign has decided to no longer count the six Pacific and African ccTLDs managed by Freenom, notably .tk, which had contributed 24.7 million names to the Q3 tally.

The report says: “the .tk, .cf, .ga, .gq and .ml ccTLDs have been excluded from all applicable calculations, due to an unexplained change in estimates for the .tk zone size and lack of verification from the registry operator for these TLDs.”

It sounds rather like there’s been another weird fluctuation in .tk’s numbers that threw off the overall trend picture again, and Verisign’s basically said “to hell with it” and decided to exclude Freenom from its reports from now on.

This means the normalized numbers for Q4 2021 — ignoring Freenom in all applicable quarters — are 341.7 million, up 3.3 million or 1.0% sequentially and up 1.6 million or 0.5% year over year, the DNIB states.

The Freenom business model is to give domains away for free, mostly, in the first instance. It makes its money by retaining and monetizing domains that either expire or, frequently, which it suspends for abuse.

.tk domains never get deleted, in other words, so counting them alongside TLDs with the industry-standard business model could give a misleading impression of the global demand for domain names.

It’s not so much that counting spam domains is bad — every TLD has a spam problem to a greater or lesser extent — but the lack of deletions can create faulty assumptions.

It’s also never been clear how Verisign and its third-party researcher, ZookNic, acquires its data on Freenom TLDs. Its .tk figure would often remain static for quarters on end, suggesting the data was only sporadically available.

I also tracked .tk’s published numbers independently for many years, and the last figure I have, from March 2019, is 41.3 million. It’s never been clear to me why the Verisign/ZookNic number has always been so much lower.

Verisign has always flagged up any oddities caused by .tk in its DNIB, and every edition has contained a footnote describing Freenom’s unusual practices.

The latest DNIB (pdf) says that .com had 160 million names, up 1.2 million, and .net had 13.4 million, down about 100,000, compared to Q3.

ccTLDs overall had 127.4 million, up about 700,000, a 0.6% sequential increase.

The ccTLD number was down by 5.3 million, or 4.0%, compared to the end of 2020, but that was due to a 9.4 million-name deletion by China’s .cn, which I noted in the second quarter and which Verisign calls a “registry-implemented zone reduction”.

Ignoring China, ccTLD names were up 4.1 million or 3.8%, the DNIB says.

Verisign only breaks out the top 10 ccTLDs separately, so the removal of .tk means that Australia’s .au is now in the top 10 list in tenth place with 3.4 million at the end of Q4. It will likely move up the ranks in the first quarter due to the release of second-level names, which has sped up its growth rate.

France’s .fr, with 3.9 million names, has now entered the overall top 10 TLDs due to .tk’s removal.

New gTLDs grew by 1.2 million names or 5.1% sequentially, but were down by pretty much the same amount annually, ending 2021 with 24.7 million names.

.kids goes live, plans to launch this year

The long-anticipated .kids top-level domain has its first live site, and the registry has announced plans to start selling domains towards the end of the year.

The contractually mandated nic.kids is now resolving, leading to the registry web site of the DotKids Foundation.

Hong Kong-based DotKids, which has close ties to DotAsia and ICANN director Edmon Chung, said the plan is to start a sunrise period in the third quarter and go to general availability in the fourth quarter this year.

There’s also going to be a special registration period for children’s rights groups and a Q3 “Pioneer Program” for early adopters.

The idea behind the gTLD is to provide a space where all content is considered suitable for under-18s, though the exact policing policies have yet to be written. DotKids is using the UN definition of a child.

It will be a tough balancing act. My fifteen-year-old nephew isn’t happy with content that doesn’t involve the laser-beam dismemberment of tentacled beasts, but a decade ago was content to watch Peppa Pig on a loop for hours a day.

DotKids won the rights to .kids, somehow beating rival applicants Amazon and Google, in 2019. It signed a very strange Registry Agreement with ICANN last year.

Previous attempts at creating child-friendly domains have proven unsuccessful.

In the US, there was a government-mandated .kids.us brought in 20 years ago, aimed at under-13s, but it was a spectacular failure, attracting just a handful of registrations. It was killed off in 2012.

Russian speakers have their own equivalent gTLD .дети, a word that has taken on more sinister overtones in recent weeks, but that currently has only about 800 names under management.

DotKids has its work cut out to make .kids a commercial success, but it is a non-profit and it was the only new gTLD applicant to have most of its ICANN fees waived under the Applicant Support Program.

Radix renewals drive growth as revenue hits $38 million

New gTLD registry Radix brought in revenue of $38 million in 2021, up 35% on the year before, the privately held company said today.

Profit was up 60% over the same period, Radix said, without disclosing the dollar amount.

It made almost as much in renewal revenue in 2021 as it made overall in 2020 — $27 million versus $17.9 million in the prior year. Last year 72% of revenue was standard-fee renewals versus 64% in 2020.

But the revenue from new regs was basically basically flat at $5.7 million versus $5.6 million — 15% versus 20% of overall revenue.

Revenue from premium-tier domains (both new regs and renews) was 12.5% of revenue, or $4.75 million, up from $4.5 million in 2020.

The customer country mix may be a little broader too. Radix said 47% of revenue now comes from the US, which is down from the 64% it reported for the previous year.

The company said .online is still the strongest performer in its portfolio.

GoDaddy formally signs .tv registry contract

GoDaddy has formally taken on the contract to run .tv, the ccTLD for the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, according to the company.

GoDaddy Registry said that the deal was signed with the Tuvalu government at the Dubai Expo 2020 trade show on March 30.

The company won a tender process last December in which incumbent Versigin, which has been running .tv for 20 years, did not participate.

Tuvalu is expected to get a much bigger share of the revenue than it did under Verisign, which paid $5 million a year, but terms have not been disclosed.

GoDaddy senior director of business development George Pongas said in a press release that the parties are “convinced that together we can position the .tv ccTLD for significant worldwide growth and a new era of brand awareness and community engagement”.

GoDaddy is substantially more customer-facing than Verisign, and controls the registration path, so it’s not difficult to see how this could boost .tv’s sales.

The deal comes at an opportune time, as user-created video content is experiencing something of a boom.

War fails to stop .ua domains selling

Ukraine’s ccTLD has maintained what appears to be a healthy level of new registrations, despite the Russian invasion.

The company today reported that between February 24 and March 25, it saw over 3,000 new .ua domain regs, over 2,000 of which were in .com.ua. The ccTLD offers names in a few dozen third-level spaces.

February 24 was the day Russia invaded, and the day Ukraine went into martial law.

“The com.ua domain is mostly used by commercial organizations. Therefore, the presence of registrations shows that Ukrainian business continues to operate under martial law,” Hostmaster wrote (via Google Translate).

.ua had a total of 534,162 domains under all 2LDs today, according to the registry’s web site.

While Hostmaster has not yet published its end-of-month stats for March, it appears that the new adds suggest an improvement on typical monthly performance, or at least business as usual.

The registry has come under denial-of-service attack dozens of times since the war started, but says it has so far continued to operate without interruption.

2LDs boost .au’s growth

Australian ccTLD registry auDA has been reporting registration volumes growing much faster than usual in the days since it started selling .au domains directly at the second level.

The company is currently reporting a grand total of 3,492,366 domains, which is up by almost 78,000 since March 24, when 2LDs went on sale.

Normally, .au rarely grows by more than about 500 domains per day.

Right now and for the next six months, all 2LDs have been reserved for the owners of their exact-match third-level domains, so there’s not the same kind of rush you might expect in a first-come, first-served scenario.

With mystery auction winner, .sexy prices go from $25 to $2,500

UNR is increasing the annual price of a .sexy domain from $25 to over $2,000, according to registrars.

The price increase will hit from April 30, according to registrars, but will not affect renewals on domains registered before that date.

French registrar Gandi said its retail price for a .sexy name will increase from $40 to $2,750. That’s after its mark-up. Belgian registrar Bnamed said in January prices were about to get 100 times more expensive.

The current wholesale price for .sexy is believed to be $25 a year. I’m guessing it’s going up to about $2,500, which is a price tag UNR has previously experimented with for its car-related gTLDs.

UNR CEO Frank Schilling has previously defended steep price increases for TLDs that under-perform volume-wise.

.sexy had barely 6,000 names under management at the last count, having peaked at about 28,000 in 2017.

The question is: who’s decided to increase the prices? Did .sexy actually sell when UNR tried to offload its portfolio last year, or is UNR keeping hold of it?

.sexy was among the 23 gTLD contracts UNR said it sold, mostly at auction, about a year ago. But it’s not one of the ones where the buyer has been yet disclosed.

The gTLDs UNR said it sold were: .audio, .blackfriday, .christmas, .click, .country, .diet, .flowers, .game, ,guitars, .help, .hiphop, .hiv, .hosting, .juegos, .link, .llp, .lol, .mom, .photo, .pics, .property, .sexy and .tattoo.

Of those, a new company called Dot Hip Hop bought .hiphop and XYZ.com bought .audio, .christmas, .diet, .flowers, .game, .guitars, .hosting, .lol, .mom and .pics.

ICANN has approved those 11 contract reassignments — after some difficulty — and said that there are six remaining in the approval process.

That only adds up to 17, meaning there are six more that UNR said it sold but for which it had not, as of a week ago, requested a contract transfer.

But in May last year, UNR “announced gross receipts of more than $40 million USD for its 20+ TLDs”, said there had be 17 participating bidders, and that 10 to 20 had “came away as winners, including six who will be operating TLDs for the first time”.

That leaves with at least five as-yet undisclosed winners from outside the industry, six contract transfers outstanding, and six gTLDs with an unknown status.

Neither UNR nor ICANN have been commenting on the status of pending transfers.

Ukraine registry hit by 57 attacks in a week

Ukrainian ccTLD registry Hostmaster today said its infrastructure was hit by 57 distributed denial of service attacks last week.

On its web site, which has continued to function during the now month-long Russian invasion, the company said it recorded the attacks between March 14 and 20, which a top strength of 10Gbps.

“All attacks were extinguished. The infrastructure of the .UA domain worked normally,” the company, usually based in Kyiv, said.

Hostmaster took the initiative in the first days of the war to move much of its infrastructure out-of-country, to protect .ua from physical damage, and to sign up to DDoS protection services.

Nigeria slashes prices to compete with .com

Nigerian ccTLD registry NiRA has lopped about 40% off the price of .ng domain names, bringing them down to a level where they are .com-competitive.

The price for a second-level name has come down to a reported NGN 5,500, which works out to about $13 a year.

.ng currently has about 178,000 domains under management, which is pretty low for a nation of some 206 million people.

The move is in line with the Nigerian government’s digital economy policy, according to NiRA.

.au names available today

Australians are able to register domain names directly under .au for the first time today, after ccTLD registry auDA liberalized its hierarchy.

Second-level names under .au will at first only be available to existing registrants of matching third-level names in zones such as .com.au and .net.au, under a priority allocation process.

This process lasts for six months and allows domain owners to claim their matching 2LD more or less immediately, assuming there are no other registrants with matching rights.

In cases where more than one registrant applies for the name domain — such as when example.com.au and example.net.au are owned by different people — a contention process kicks in.

Registrants with reg dates before the cut-off of February 4, 2018 get priority over those with later dates.

If there are only registrants with names newer than the cut-off date, the oldest one gets priority.

If there are only registrants with names older than the cut-off date, they’ll have to come to a bilateral agreement about who gets the name. If they can’t come to a deal, the name stays reserved, and the applicants will have to renew their applications annually, until only one applicant remains.

There are no auDA-backed auctions envisaged by the process.

Any domains that are unclaimed at the end of the priority process will be released into the available pool on September 20.

It’s a much shorter grandfathering period than other liberalized ccTLDs, such as Nominet, which gave .co.uk registrants five years to claim their matching 2LD, and it will be interesting to see what impact this has on uptake.

Direct .uk domains became available in June 2014, and six months later barely a quarter million had been registered, against over 10 million third-level names.

As the five-year priority window drew to a close in 2019, there were about 2.5 million .uk 2LDs, but this spiked to 3.6 million in the final month, as registrants waited until the last minute to claim their names.

That turned out to be the peak — .uk 2LDs stand at fewer than 1.4 million today, compared to the 9.7 million third-level names. It’s still quite rare to spot a direct .uk name in the wild here.

One interesting kink in the priority process is that auDA, which has stricter rules than many other ccTLDs, will check that anyone who applies for a 2LD is in fact eligible for the 3LD they currently hold, which could dissuade applications.

.au currently has 3.4 million third-level domains under management.