Credit union gTLD changes hands to perhaps surprising buyer

Yet another new gTLD is moving to a new registry, but this time it’s not a case of a large gTLD holder bulking up its portfolio.

This time it’s .creditunion, and the new registry is 18-year-old .coop registry DotCooperation, according to ICANN records.

.creditunion was delegated to the Credit Union Nation Association, the trade group for US credit unions, in 2015 and launched in 2017.

Like .coop, it’s a tightly restricted TLD, with eligibility only for those with a “meaningful nexus to the credit union sector”.

It had 580 domains at the last count, having peaked at 640 a couple years ago. The domains are being used as primary domains by at least a couple dozen credit unions.

But volume was never the plan for .creditunion, with CUNA specifically citing .coop as its role model in its 2012 new gTLD application.

“The success of the gTLD will not be measured by the number of domain names registered. Instead, it will be measured by the level of consumer recognition and trust,” CUNA said back then.

CUNA actually announced the DotCooperation deal in a press release on its web site at the end of September, but I don’t think anyone in the domain industry noticed.

.coop, which is reserved for co-operative associations, was one of the original 2000-round new gTLDs. It’s been chugging along at relatively low volume for the last two decades, peaking at 15,000 in February 2013.

For the last few years, it’s been growing by maybe a dozen or so domains a month, and currently stands at about 8,300 names.

DotCooperation is jointly owned by the National Cooperative Business Association and the International Cooperative Alliance.

Comment Tagged: .coop, .creditunion, acquisition, cuna, dotcooperation, ICANN, new gTLDs

After 20 years, DomainTools takes its first VC dough

DomainTools has taken a “significant” investment from a venture capital firm, the first outside funding its received in its 20-year history.

The amount of the investment is undisclosed, but DomainTools said its investor is Battery Ventures.

Battery already owns stakes in numerous software and technology companies, but this appears to be its first foray into the domain name space.

Its principal, Jordan Welu, and partner Dave Tabors will join DomainTools’ board of directors and Andy Rothery, a Battery “executive-in-residence”, will become its executive chairman.

DomainTools said in a press release:

This investment will drive more rapid innovation in DomainTools’ platform capabilities for machine learning-based threat analytics and predictive risk scoring, along with enhanced product development around automating threat intelligence and incident response workflows.

The company is all about the “threat intelligence” nowadays, no doubt partly due to the fact that its original mission of aggregating the world’s Whois data will become decreasingly useful in light of privacy laws such as GDPR.

As a private company its financial position is unknown, but I’ll note that it did take a big chunk of change out of the US taxpayers’ pocket earlier this year under a government coronavirus-related corporate-relief program.

Comment Tagged: battery ventures, DomainTools, gdpr, investment, privacy, vc, whois

Gay charities get first taste of domain cash

Top Level Design, which runs .gay, said today it has released its first tranche of cash to LGBTQ charities.

Since its September launch, it’s handed $124,400 to non-profits CenterLink and GLAAD, the company said.

Top Level Design has long promised to give 20% of its top line to these charities. At $25 a pop, that’s a $5 donation per domain.

This initial handout seems to be high, given the current level of domains under management, presumably due to higher sunrise fees and premium domains pricing.

The gTLD currently has 6,345 domains in its zone file.

Comment Tagged: .gay, centerlink, glaad, top level design

CIRA hits major .ca milestone on 20th anniversary

Canadian ccTLD registry CIRA has registered its three millionth domain, having grown .ca by over 160,000 names this year.

By happy coincidence, the milestone was hit November 30, exactly 20 years after CIRA officially took over the registry from its predecessor.

CIRA said that regs are up 34% this year, the boosted growth largely due to more small businesses coming online due to the coronavirus pandemic.

This all means that .ca is the 12th-largest ccTLD in the world, according to the registry.

Comment Tagged: .ca, cira, coronavirus, covid-19, pandemic

.org made $97 million last year

Public Interest Registry has published its 2019 tax returns, revealing a top line of $97.1 million.

That’s a tad under the $101.1 million it reported for 2018, presumably due to the declining number of .org domains under management.

It lost roughly 200,000 names in 2019, bottoming out at 10.4 million, though it has since recovered in 2020.

The returns also reveal that back-end provider Afilias was paid $18.3 million for its trouble, and ICANN was paid $2.6 million in fees.

The Internet Society, which owns PIR and uses it for most of its funding, was paid $67.5 million, up from the $48.7 million given in 2018.

The form also list the salary and bonuses for 20-odd staffers and directors, for the salary voyeurs among you.

Comment Tagged: .org, earnings, financials, isoc, pir

XYZ launches its beauty-themed gTLDs with slashed prices

XYZ.com is readying the launch of its four recently acquired beauty-themed gTLDs, along with one other.

.skin, .hair .makeup and .beauty entered their sunrise periods today, where they will stay until February 10.

All four were acquired from L’Oreal earlier this year, but .makeup was the only one that had launched and gone through its mandatory sunrise.

Despite this, XYZ is putting .makeup through what it calls a “trademark owner landrush”, where domains will cost IP owners about a grand.

That’s actually a lot cheaper than the price L’Oreal had the domains at during general availability — deterrent pricing of around $5,500 wholesale per year.

It looks like all four domains in this mini-portfolio will be priced around the $20 mark at registrars during general availability, which is due to begin March 2.

There’s also going to be an Early Access Period for seven days from February 10.

All of the above also applies to .quest, which XYZ acquired from a Hong Kong multilevel marketing firm a year ago. XYZ is marketing it as a TLD for “gurus, knowledgeable experts, and authorities in any field”.

Comment Tagged: .beauty, .hair, .makeup, .skin, l'oreal, launch, sunrise, xyz.com

“Criminal” domain suspensions drop again in .uk but thousands of pandemic domains frozen

Nominet suspended thousands fewer suspected criminal domains in 2020 than last year, according to the registry’s latest annual update.

For the 12 months to the end of October, Nominet took down 22,158 domains, is down from 28,937 in the year-ago period.

As usual, suspected intellectual property crime made up almost all the takedowns — the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit was behind 21,632 requests, down from 28,606.

Notably, despite the reported uptick in scams related to the coronavirus pandemic, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency made just 13 takedown requests, down from 31.

This is perhaps due to Nominet taking a proactive approach, putting domains containing certain related keywords on hold at the point of registration. It froze 3,811 such domains this year, later releasing 1,568.

Eight domains were suspended for criminal activity related to Covid-19, the company said.

There were no suspensions related to banned “rape” domains, despite over a thousand new registrations being flagged for manual review. Nor were there any takedowns of domains hosting child sexual abuse material.

It’s the second year in a row that suspensions have been down. In the 2017/18 period Nominet took down 32,813 domains.

1 Comment Tagged: .uk, coronavirus, covid-19, crime, intellectual property, nominet, pandemic, suspensions, takedowns

NameSilo in profit as sales rise 11%

Canadian registrar NameSilo today reported a profit for the third quarter, as bookings increased 11% sequentially over the three months to September 30.

One of the fastest-growing registrars, the company said that as of today it has 3.54 million domains under management, up from the 3.45 million it reported at the start of September.

NameSilo said its revenue for the quarter was $8.07 million, up 2.8% on Q3 2019. Its net income was $2,72 million, compared to a net loss of $753,093 a year earlier.

Much of the net income was attributable to income on investments, the firm said.

Bookings, which represents the number of domains sold but not yet recognized as revenue for accounting purposes, was up 11% compared to Q2 at $8.4 million.

Comment Tagged: earnings, financials, namesilo

CentralNic more than doubles revenue as parking business thrives

CentralNic today reported revenue growth of 118% for the nine months to September 30, largely on the back of its recently acquired domain monetization business.

The company said it made a net loss after tax of $6.2 million, compared to $6 million, on revenue of $168.5 million.

Still casting itself as the domain industry’s consolidator, most of the growth came due to acquisitions made over the last couple of years, so CentralNic has also published pro forma results to give a better sense of organic growth.

On that basis, revenue was up a still-decent 17%.

The acquisition of Team Internet, which offers the ParkingCrew and Tonic monetization services, for $48 million just over a year ago was the biggest booster of growth.

Pro forma, CentralNic’s monetization segment was up 39% to $72.9 million in revenue, mostly due to a whopping 36% increase in RPMs.

Ninety-two percent of its monetization revenue comes from a single customer.

CentralNic’s indirect segment, which unhelpfully bundles together its registrar reseller channel with its registry service provider operation and .sk registry operator business, was up 51% to $63.5 million and up 8% to $65.2 million pro forma.

The company said the growth was mostly due to the acquisitions of TPP Wholesale and Hexonet Group last year.

The direct segment, which comprises its retail registrars as well as software and consultancy, dipped by 9% to $32.1 million, or 2% to $31.8 million pro forma.

Comment Tagged: centralnic, earnings, financials

WIPO handles 50,000th UDRP case as coronavirus drives complaints

The World Intellectual Property Organization handled its 50,000th UDPR case on November 20, the organization has announced.

It’s taken WIPO, which designed the policy and was the first to administer it back in 1999, over two decades to reach this milestone.

WIPO said that the 50,000 cases cover almost 91,000 domains, with complaints and respondents from over 180 countries.

The organization believes the coronavirus pandemic this year has driven growth, with an 11% increase in cases recorded between January and October. There were 3,405 cases over this period.

Erik Wilbers, director of the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center, said in a press release:

With a greater number of people spending more time online during the pandemic, cybersquatters are finding an increasingly target-rich environment. Rights owners, meantime, are stepping up their brand enforcement on the Internet as they further shift to marketing and selling online.

Comment Tagged: coronavirus, covid-19, cybersquatting, pandemic, udrp, wipo