Okay, pedants, only 36% of new gTLDs are shrinking

Thirty-six percent of non-brand new gTLDs are shrinking, DI analysis shows.
According to numbers culled from zone files, 156 of the 435 commercial gTLDs we looked at had fewer domains yesterday than they did a year earlier.
On the bright side, that means the majority of them are still growing, but…

You: Wait, Kev, didn’t you write this exact same story yesterday, but said that 40% of new gTLDs were shrinking? Why are you now saying it’s 36%?
Me: People in the comments and on social media complained that I’d used domains under management (DUM) from May’s registry transaction reports — the most recent available — to collate the data yesterday, rather than more recent but less accurate zone files.
You: Why did they complain?
Me: I think because the May numbers show .xyz gaining on an annual basis, and yet everyone and his grandmother knows that .xyz’s numbers dropped off a cliff in July.
Your Grandmother: It’s true, they did. They lost millions…
You: Shut up, Gran. So, Kev, presumably if you do the same survey again, using the same TLDs, but use zone file data from this week instead, you’ll discover that the number of shrinking TLDs is far greater than 40%?
Me: Why would you presume that?
You: Because I also hate new gTLDs in general, not just .xyz specifically.
Me: Actually, the number of shrinking new gTLDs turns out to be smaller.
You: How come?
Me: Because only 36% of the gTLDs I surveyed had fewer numbers in their September 18, 2017 zone file than they did in their September 18, 2016 zone file.
You: So you actually over-reported the shrinkage in your first post? How come? I thought you were a shameless stooge of the new gTLD industry.
Me: I get that a lot.
You: Is .xyz at least on the list of biggest losers now?
Me: It is. Right at the top.
You: Good. I really fucking hate .xyz. What else changed? Stands to reason that some losers first time around are now gainers.
Me: Correct. Famous Four Media’s .party, for example, was a top 10 loser in the report comparing May 2016 DUM to May 2017 DUM, losing over 100,000 names, but it’s a top 10 gainer in the September-September zone file report, adding 85,000.
You: Explain.
Me: Well, .party’s reg numbers fell off a cliff in July 2016, and were still pretty depressed a year ago, but have since regained ground, presumably due to them costing less than a pack of gum.
You: Got it. Any others?
Me: It’s a similar story for .webcam, .work, .bar, .audio, .rest and a few others. They all shrunk May-May but gained September-September.
You: So, in summary, the new gTLD industry isn’t as unhealthy as you made out on Monday?
Me: Maybe. To be honest I don’t think the disparity between 36% and 40% makes a whole lot of difference. It’s still quite a lot of TLDs growing in the wrong direction. At one time, that kind of thing was virtually unheard of.
You: True dat.
Me: Anyway, can I get back to my blog post now?
You: Sure. Just don’t expect me to read to the end.

5 Comments Tagged: new gTLDs

L’Oreal is using “closed generic” .makeup in an interesting way

What do you call a registry that defensively registers names on behalf of the very people that would be its most likely customers if the TLD weren’t so hideously overpriced?
L’Oreal, apparently.
About half of its .makeup new gTLD comprises the names or nicknames of social media “influencers” in the make-up scene, and they all seem to belong to the registry.
Ironically, these are precisely the kind of people you’d expect to actually go out and register .makeup domains, if they didn’t cost close to $7,000 a pop.
L’Oreal put a $5,500 wholesale price-tag on .makeup domains, evidently as a Plan B to avoid actually having to sell names to people, after its original plan to keep the string as a “closed generic” failed due to ICANN politicking.
As you might expect, uptake has been minimal. The zone file currently has about 266 domains in it.
Beyond L’Oreal itself, there are defensive registrations by companies not remotely related to the make-up industry, such as BMW and Intuit, and registrations by competing companies in the cosmetics industry, such as Christian Dior and Estee Lauder.
But there are also something like 150 .makeup domains that were all registered at the same time, this April, representing the names and social media handles of young women who post YouTube videos about makeup for their often thousands of subscribers.
It turns out these women are all participants (willing, it seems) in WeLove.Makeup, a web site created by L’Oreal to promote its products.
The site is basically a social media aggregator. Each “influencer” has their own page, populated by their posts from YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and such. It’s maintained by Findie, which specializes in that kind of thing.
The domains matching the participants names do not resolve to the site, however. They’re all registered to L’Oreal’s registry management partner Fairwinds and resolve to ad-free registrar parking pages.
The names were registered via 101Domain, which prices .makeup names at $6,999, but I’ve no idea what payment arrangement Fairwinds/L’Oreal has for this kind of thing.
This is what a wannabe closed generic can look like, it seems — the registry pricing its customers out of the market then registering their names on their behalf anyway.
Is this “innovation”?

Comment Tagged: .makeup, closed generics, findie, ICANN, l'oreal, new gTLDs, welove.makeup

Four in 10 new gTLDs are shrinking

Forty percent of non-brand new gTLDs are shrinking, DI analysis shows.
According to numbers culled from registry reports, 172 of the 435 commercial gTLDs we looked at had fewer domains under management at the start of June than they did a year earlier.
On the bright side, that means the majority of them are still growing, but it’s still a pretty poor showing.
As you might expect, registries with the greatest exposure to the budget and/or Chinese markets were hardest hit over the period.
.wang, .red, .ren, .science and .party all saw DUM decline by six figures. Another 27 gTLDs saw declines of over 10,000 names.
Of the portfolio registries, Famous Four Media, Uniregistry and Afilias saw the steepest falls, each churning through hundreds of thousands of domains.
FFM strings including .science, .party and .date, which are regularly offered for under $0.50 and have terrible renewal rates, were among the biggest losers.
For Afilias, its .red, .blue and .pink combined saw volumes plummet by over 300,000. Its Korean-surname-themed .kim lost 90,000 names over the year.
Much of Uniregistry’s decline, I believe, is due to the expiration of thousands of domains that were essentially registry-owned.
Here’s a list of the top 40 biggest losers.
[table id=48 /]
At the opposite end of the table, the biggest gainers over the 12-month period were .xyz, .loan, .top, .online, .men, .tech, .kiwi, .club, .site and .bid.
Those 10 TLDs all saw volumes increase by over 100,000 names.
But that’s not necessarily hugely encouraging news, for various reasons.
We already know that .xyz is set to lose millions of names over its next couple of monthly registry reports.
One could guess that the peaks in Famous Four strings .bid, .loan and .men are likely to be matched by troughs before long.
.kiwi appears to be on the list due to its waiving the fees on about 200,000 domains, under a deal with a registrar last year.
.club recently said that it only expects to get 10% to 15% renewals on about 700,000 of its million total names.
Finally, .top is widely thought of as the TLD of choice for throwaway spam domains and has already lost a couple million names since June.
Here’s the top 30 gainers from my list:
[table id=49 /]
For the survey, I selected only new gTLDs from the 2012 round that had general availability dates in 2015 or earlier. I excluded any gTLD with Specifications 9 or 13, which act as a dot-brand flag, in their ICANN contract.
The 436 resulting TLDs include both wide-open, commercially available namespaces such as .link and .xyz, and the more restricted zones such as .bank and .law.

4 Comments Tagged: new gTLDs

Domain growth flat in Q2

Growth in the volume of registered domain names was exactly the same in the second quarter as it was in the first.
That’s according to the latest Domain Name Industry Brief, published by Verisign late last week.
Q2 closed with 331.9 million registered names, up 1.3 million or 0.4% sequentially. The Q1 DNIB published three months ago also showed net growth of 1.3 million names.
That’s an increase of 6.7 million names, 2.1%, over the second quarter 2016, which compares unfavorably to the first quarter’s annual growth of 11.8 million names.
A slight majority of the 1.3 million bump seems to have come from .com and .net, which together grew from 143.6 million to 144.3 million names, roughly a 700,000 name or 0.4% sequential increase.
ccTLDs fared a little better, going to to 144.2 million names from 143.1 million in Q1. That’s a 1.1 million increase.
New gTLDs took the edge off the overall industry growth, shrinking from 25.4 million names in Q1 to 24.3 million in Q2.
That’s largely due to the expiration of millions of speculative .xyz registrations that were given away for free or nearly free in 2016.
As anticipated, .xyz fell off the top 10 list of all TLDs to be replaced by 17-year-old .info, which added an impressive 300,000 names to wind up in the #9 spot ahead of flat Netherlands ccTLD .nl.

Comment Tagged: dnib, domain name industry brief, versigin

Another ccTLD plays down the “com”

Another ccTLD operator has decided to allow registrants to register domains at the second level.
Following a trend that has swept the country-code world over the last few years, Malta’s NIC (Malta) said direct .mt registrations will become available December 1.
Previously, only third-level regs under .com.mt, .org.mt, .net.mt, .edu.mt and .gov.mt were possible.
NIC (Malta) said that existing .mt registrants will be able to claim their matching second-level names for free until the end of November 2020.
That’s a similar policy to the one adopted by Nominet in the UK, one of several ccTLDs to allow “direct” registrations in recent years. Others include New Zealand (.nz), Kenya (.ke) and, possibly but controversially, Australia (.au).
There are no residency requirements to register .mt names. Prices are usually around €20 to €30 per year, but NIC (Malta) said prices will be “halved” come December.
If you’re curious about the second-level policy change opening up new domain hacks, forget about it.
Apart from variations on “dreamt” (which doesn’t even pass a US English spell-check), there are bugger-all words ending in “mt”, according to the various Scrabble-cheating web sites I never use.

3 Comments Tagged: .mt, cctlds, nic (malta), second-level

Will ICANN punt on .amazon again?

Amazon is piling pressure onto ICANN to finally approve its five-year-old gTLD applications for .amazon, but it seems to me the e-commerce giant will have a while to wait yet.
The company sent a letter to ICANN leadership this week calling on it to act quickly on the July ruling of an Independent Review Process panel that found ICANN had breached its own bylaws when it rejected the .amazon and and Chinese and Japanese transliterations.
Amazon’s letter said:

Such action is necessary because there is no sovereign right under international or national law to the name “Amazon,” because there are no well-founded and substantiated public policy reasons to block our Applications, because we are committed to using the TLDs in a respectful manner, and because the Board should respect the IRP accountability mechanism.

ICANN had denied the three applications based on nothing more than the consensus advice of its Governmental Advisory Committee, which had been swayed by the arguments of primarily Brazil and Peru that there were public policy reasons to keep the gTLD available for possible future use by its own peoples.
The string “Amazon”, among its many uses, is of course the name of a river and a rain forest that covers much of the South American continent.
But the IRP panel decided that the ICANN board should have at least required the GAC to explain its public policy arguments, rather than just accepting its advice as a mandate from on-high.
Global Domains Division chief Akram Atallah had testified before the panel that consensus GAC advice sets a bar “too high for the Board to say no.”
But the governmental objections “do not appear to be based on well-founded public policy concerns that justify the denial of the applications” the IRP panelists wrote.
The panel, in a 2-to-1 ruling, instructed ICANN to reopen Amazon’s applications.
Since the July ruling, ICANN’s board has not discussed how to proceed, but it seems likely that the matter will come up at its Montevideo, Uruguay retreat later this month.
No agenda for this meeting has yet been published, but there will be an unprecedented public webcast of the full formal board meeting, September 23.
The Amazon letter specifically asks the ICANN board of directors to not refer the .amazon matter back to the GAC for further advice, but I think that’s probably the most likely outcome.
I say this largely because while ICANN’s bylaws specifically allow it to reject GAC advice, it has cravenly avoided such a confrontation for most of its history.
It has on occasion even willfully misinterpreted GAC advice in order to appear that it has accepted it when it has not.
The GAC, compliantly, regularly provides pieces of advice that its leaders have acknowledged are deliberately vague and open to interpretation (for a reason best known to the politicians themselves).
It seems to me the most likely next step in the .amazon case is for the board to ask the GAC to reaffirm or reconsider its objection, giving the committee the chance to save face — and avoid a lengthy mediation process — by providing the board with something less than a consensus objection.
If ICANN were to do this, my feeling is that the GAC at large would probably be minded to stick to its guns.
But it only takes one government to voice opposition to advice for it to lose its “consensus” status, making it politically much easier for ICANN to ignore.
Hypothetically, the US government could return to its somewhat protectionist pre-2014 position of blocking consensus on .amazon, but that might risk fanning the flames of anti-US sentiment.
While the US no longer has its unique role in overseeing ICANN’s IANA function, it still acts as the jurisdictional overlord for the legal organization, which some other governments still hate.
A less confrontational approach might be to abstain and to allow friendly third-party governments to roadblock consensus, perhaps by emphasizing the importance of ICANN being seen to accountable in the post-transition world.
Anyway, this is just my gut premonition on how this could play out, based on the track records of ICANN and the GAC.
If ICANN can be relied on for anything, it’s to never make a decision on something today if it can be put off until tomorrow.

6 Comments Tagged: amazon, brazil, gac, geographic, ICANN, montevideo, new gTLDs, peru

MMX sells 7,000 domains for $3.4 million

New gTLD registry MMX said it has sold $3.4 million in “premium” .vip domains names to Chinese domainers in the last few months.
In what is believed to be a small number of deals to a limited number of investors, “over 7,000” domains changed hands since they became available in late June.
MMX said that $2.8 million of the deals closed in the last 10 days.
While we don’t have the exact number of domains, it looks to work out in the ball-park of $485 per domain.
As $3.4 million is a materially significant number — the company’s entire revenue for 2016 was $15.6 million — it was disclosed to the financial markets this morning.
.vip has been MMX’s cash cow, so far amassing a zone file with more than 600,000 domains names in it.
For some reason it has been hugely popular in China — the vast majority of its registrations have been through Chinese registrars and 59% of its overall revenue was from China in 2016.
In April, the company sold 200,000 .vip names to a single Chinese investor for $1.3 million.
MMX has also said that renewal rates for .vip, which only launched last year, have been over 75%.

1 Comment Tagged: .vip, china, Minds + Machines, mmx, premium

.CLUB HQ trashed by Irma, nobody hurt

.CLUB Domains returned to its new digs in Fort Lauderdale, Florida yesterday to find the building trashed by hurricane Irma.

Fortunately, none of the .club gTLD registry’s 17 employees were hurt during Irma, the category 5 hurricane which lashed Florida over the weekend.
Irma caused at least 10 reported deaths in the state and untold amounts of property damage. Over its full path, close to 50 people have been reported killed.
Chief marketing officer Jeff Sass said that “large parts of the roof had been torn away, exposing our office to devastating wind and rain, pretty much ruining everything”.
“Literally, it looks like a bomb went off. I couldn’t believe the damage. It’s truly a sad day for our company. We feel for everyone affected by this horrible storm and we are very fortunate as all our staff are safe,” CEO Colin Campbell said in a blog post.
Ironically, the building had been scheduled for a refurbishment anyway.
.CLUB plans to use the facility as a tech startup incubator under the brand Startups.club. It had recently been approved for funding by the local Fort Lauderdale government, according to Sass.
None of the company’s registry operations, which are based hundreds of miles north in Virginia, were affected by the damage.
Fellow new gTLD registry MMX is legally based in the thoroughly devastated British Virgin Islands, but has no staff or premises there so was unaffected.
Domain Name Wire is reporting that some registry functions of Anguilla’s .ai ccTLD, also in Irma’s path, were not working in its wake.
Photo: .CLUB Domains

7 Comments Tagged: .club, .club domains, hurricane irma

XYZ slashes $10 million a year from premium stash

XYZ.com has slashed the asking price of a few thousand “premium” .xyz domain names, in some cases by many thousands of dollars.
Overall, it looks like the company has dropped prices by a total of $10.8 million.
At the top end of its reserved list, several single and double-character domains previously priced a $55,000 per year have been reduced to $13,000 per year.
At the lower end, domains previously priced at around $1,300 are now around $300.
Those are the recommended retail prices. Some registrars are offering them with a substantial mark-up.
The reductions affect 2,700 of the domains on XYZ’s premium list, which runs to about 3,075 names in total.
Whereas the previous hypothetical value of the full list was $15.3 million a year, it’s now at $4.4 million a year.
Of course, they’re not worth anything unless somebody is willing to pay the price, and the domains still seem to have end-user price tags on them.
Premium renewal fees have so far proved unpopular in the domain investing community due to the large carrying cost.
XYZ’s full list can be obtained here.

8 Comments Tagged: .xyz, new gTLDs, premium, xyz.com

CentralNic extends XYZ deal until 2032

CentralNic and XYZ.com have extended their registry services pact for the next fifteen years, according to CentralNic.
Announcing its first-half 2017 financial results today, CentralNic said the back-end contract has been extended until 2032.
It’s an unusually long duration for a registry services contract, which are usually much more likely to run about five years.
It even lasts 10 years beyond the expiration of XYZ.com’s own ICANN contracts (though renewal of these is a near-certainty).
The deal covers all .xyz domains, as well as all of the other TLDs in XYZ.com’s portfolio. That currently includes the likes of .rent, .storage and .college.
CentralNic said it “will receive a fixed fee based on the volume of .xyz registrations and subscriptions managed” under the new deal.
In a statement to the markets, CEO Ben Crawford said the relationship “has been updated to normalise the Company’s revenues and profits going forward.”
I believe the previous contract contained a per-domain component, which exposed CentralNic’s revenue to .xyz’s erratic pricing-influenced growth trajectory.
.xyz’s zone file has shrunk by a whopping four million domains since this time last year, causing it to lose the crown of highest-volume new gTLD, due to it offering free or almost free domains that expired without renewing after a year.
However, CentralNic disclosed that the proportion of its own wholesale transaction volumes that were renewals (rather than adds and transfers, I assume) was 18% in the first half, up from 2% in the same 2016 period.
For the six months ended June 30, the company had overall revenue of £10.6 million ($13.9 million), up 18.5% year over year.
Its net loss after tax was £619,000 ($810,000), down from £1.3 million. At the EBITDA level, profit was £1.4 million ($1.8 million) compared to $900,000 in H1 2016.
While I still stubbornly think of CentralNic as primarily a registry play, in fact the company now gets about three quarters of its revenue today from its retail registrar division, which contributed just shy of £8 million to the total in H1.
Instra, the Australian registrar it acquired at the end of 2015, contributed £5.83 million.
The wholesale division, registry back-end services — contributed £1.82 million to revenue and £450,000 to EBITDA in the half.
That’s despite CentralNic being the back-end for six of the top 20 new gTLDs by volume — .website, .space, .tech, .site, .online, and .xyz
If we tally up the number of domains in only those six TLDs, we get to about 4.2 million, per their zone files.
The company’s third reporting unit, Enterprise, contributed £800,000 ($1 million) in the half, of which £360,000 ($471,000) came from premium domain sales.

2 Comments Tagged: .xyz, centralnic, earnings, financials, instra, internet.bs, xyz.com