.hiv reserve set at $200,000, revenue so far $83,000

The soon-to-be-auctioned new gTLD .hiv has a reserve price of $200,000, but the registry reckons it’s worth as much as $700,000.
That’s according to auction documents provided by dotHIV Registry to DI today.
The documents also reveal that .hiv has made a profit revenue of $83,000 in its first seven months.
UPDATE: Germany-based dotHIV says now that the reference to “net income” in its prospectus was a translation error. The $83,000 refers to revenue — the top line, not the bottom line. The company intends to update its auction documents “instantly”.
Earlier today we reported that the gTLD is to go under the hammer with Innovative Auctions on June 3/4.
We reported that the gTLD had about 2,000 registrations, but it turns out that number includes about 1,700 registry-reserved names.
The actual number, as of March 31, is 410, of which 345 pay the $179 annual registry fee. Another 63 domains were given away for free to HIV charities for a three-year period.
While this generated a net income revenue of $83,000, registry CEO Carolin Silbernagl confirmed to DI that its contract with ICANN is supposed to require “all” of its profits to be donated to HIV causes.
According to the documents:

Public Interest Commitment binds the TLD to non-profit operations. All excess profit, after the deduction of all thinkable costs and investments, is to be donated to a charitable cause of the owner’s choice.
…
We have founded and built the .hiv TLD as a tool for positive social impact. To safeguard this vision, the voluntary PIC in the .hiv Registry Agreement binds the owner to invest all excess profit in the projects that support the fight against AIDS.
All this comes at no risk for the registry: Operational costs are covered first. No one expects you to donate if there is no surplus. Costs include the purchase price of the TLD in this auction.

The registry’s documents affirm that the key reason to buy .hiv would be to boost your public image due to “corporate social responsibility”.
The buyer would also get free marketing support from the German ad agency thjnk and free data escrow from NCC Group until July 2017, along with a bunch of software dotHIV uses to manage the TLD.
According to dotHIV, there were 14,000 pre-registrations with registrars prior to launch. Most balked at the high registration fee and did not convert into buyers.
The registry says the new owner could capitalize on some of this interest, growing volumes, by reducing its registry fee.
There are 47 registrars accredited to sell .hiv domains, including Go Daddy.
Premium names sold so far, for between $1,500 and $5,000, include: treat.hiv, test.hiv, cure.hiv, prevent.hiv, magazin.hiv, hivanswers.hiv, prävention.hiv, prep.hiv, vorsorge.hiv.
If dotHIV makes a profit from selling the gTLD, it says it will donate it to HIV charities.

10 Comments Tagged: .hiv, auctions, dothiv, innovative auctions, new gTLDs

KickAssTorrents continues world tour after latest ccTLD ban

One of the most popular sites for finding copyright-infringing BitTorrent files is reportedly heading to Costa Rica after its latest choice of ccTLD banned it.
KickAssTorrents, which is about the 100th most-popular site on the web, had moved to kickasstorrents.im yesterday, but found its new domain deleted by the Isle of Man registry in a matter of hours.
The site’s owners have TorrentFreak said they now plan to move to kat.cr, in the Costa Rican ccTLD.
KAT has previously been hosted in Somalia’s .so, Tonga’s .to and the Philippines’ .ph.
Here in the UK, major ISPs are obliged to block access to the site after a court ruling.

Comment Tagged: .cr, .im, kickasstorrents, piracy

.hiv to auction with “no profiting” catch

Don’t all rush to your checkbooks at once.
The live TLD .hiv is going to be among the next batch of new gTLDs auctioned off by Innovative Auctions, but the contract comes with a no-profit clause.
Innovative and dotHIV Registry announced the sale yesterday.
.hiv is an unsuccessful gTLD so far. It had just over 2,000 registered names at the end of 2014, according to registry reports, but never more than 423 the names have been present in the DNS.
Registry CEO Carolin Silbernagl said:

In the eight months since our launch we have gained a lot of insight about what it needs to reach this. The reason why we are offering .hiv for sale is because we see how successful it can be. However, we realized that dotHIV is not the right vehicle for the next phase – the TLD needs a bigger and more international home to truly spread its wings.

It went to general availability last August, with an innovative but risky business model based around charitable micro-donations to HIV/AIDS causes.
Of the $200 annual retail fee, dotHIV put $120 into a pool reserved for charities. Every visit to a .hiv that was participating in a “Click Counter” service would cause a small amount of that money to actually be donated.
Judging by visits to a few .hiv domains this morning, just €862 — less than $1,000 — has been donated so far, based on fewer than 133,000 clicks.
This donation model is “just one of many possible uses” and not a contractual requirement, according to Silbernagl.
There is, however, a binding Public Interest Commitment that obliges the registry to give “all excess profits” to HIV causes. The PIC reads:

Registry Operator commits to implementing and performing the following protections for the TLD: Registry Operator, as a social enterprise, is driven by its sole mission to support the global HIV response. Therefore, Registry Operator will reinvest all excess profits in projects serving this mission.

Not it’s not exactly an attractive investment opportunity, in terms of pure cash ROI.
But Innovative said there’s another reason to buy: “Approaching .hiv as a corporate philanthropic engagement could have positive effects on public image and employee satisfaction for the buyer.”
.hiv is due to be part of the June 3/4 live gTLD auction, which also includes .promo.

4 Comments Tagged: .hiv, applicant auction, auctions, dothiv, innovative auctions, new gTLDs

New gTLD zones top five million names

There are now more than five million new gTLD domain names live in the DNS.
That’s according to zone files collated by ICANN, which I’m told show 5,002,252 names across the 597 new gTLD registries providing data.
That works out to a mean of 8,378 domains per TLD, a median of 1,254.
The largest zone file is .xyz, with 877,450 names. There’s at least 100 new gTLDs with only one domain in their zones.
Due to the way ICANN’s Centralized Zone Data Service works (or doesn’t work) with access rights expiring on a pretty much daily basis, it’s virtually impossible for a third party such as DI to count up zone file numbers across every new gTLD with 100% daily accuracy.
Today, DI PRO reports a count of 4,999,024 names.
The total number of zone file domains in this post was provided by ICANN, which does not have the same CZDS restrictions as the rest of us.

3 Comments Tagged: czds, ICANN, new gTLDs

As .stream is won, ICANN’s auction list empties

.stream has become the latest new gTLD contention set to be settled prior to its ICANN auction, leaving ICANN’s auction schedule looking barren.
Famous Four Media beat Hughes Satellite Systems to the string, which was due to auction May 27.
The four strings scheduled for bidding April 29 — .living, .fun, .map and .search — were also recently settled.
All that remains on ICANN’s schedule is the controversial .game/.games contention set, which will employ a unique process designed for contention sets created by inconsistent singular/plural string confusion rulings.
The five .game applicants and one .games applicant (Donuts) are still due to hit the block May 20.
A couple dozen other gTLDs are still pending ICANN auction but do not have set dates due to various challenges and disputes.

Comment Tagged: .stream, auctions, famous four, ICANN, new gTLDs

Go Daddy splashes out $28m on Marchex domain portfolio

Go Daddy has acquired about 200,000 domain names from Marchex for $28.1 million.
The sale comes as Marchex seeks to extricate itself from the domain name business in order to focus on mobile advertising analytics.
It works out at about $140 per domain.
Go Daddy said that it will make the domains available via its multi-registrar Afternic platform, which should massively increase their visibility among potential buyers.
The deal was a “unique opportunity” that doesn’t represent a change in direction for the registrar.
Domain Name Wire has an interview with company senior VP Mark McLaughlin over here which explains Go Daddy’s plans in a bit more detail.
Marchex said that it has also sold $6.7 million worth of domains from the portfolio separately since January.

Comment Tagged: go daddy, marchex

.london clear winner as M+M releases raw reg data

.london accounts for over 37% of sales in Minds + Machines’ portfolio of live gTLDs, according to company data released this morning.
M+M published registration figures for its 19 generally available TLDs as part of a trading update ahead of its full-year financials.
The data shows that four of its top five strings are geographic in nature.
[table id=32 /]
The TLDs have launch dates ranging from April 2014 to April 2015.
It should be noted that .kiwi and .gop are run by M+M clients, with M+M providing the back-end only.
There’s a delta of up to 5% between these reg numbers and the numbers of domains appearing in the zone files of some of these gTLDs.
For example, we count 59,162 domains in .london’s zone file and 27,955 in .bayern today, suggesting that on any given day a couple thousand domains are not configured in the DNS.
In other TLDs, such as .kiwi and .work, the zone file numbers and the reg numbers have almost no difference at all.
The company also disclosed that in its registrar business “Premium Names”, which command a higher fee, account for 3% of its registrations and 25% of revenue.
M+M recently headhunted Trent Tucker from Rightside to manage premium name sales.

2 Comments Tagged: m+m, Minds + Machines, new gTLDs

Dirty tricks claimed in .music fight

A .music hopeful has tried to add over 300 pages of documents to its new gTLD application, apparently in an effort to leapfrog competitors, and its rival community applicant is far from happy.
DotMusic Limited submitted the change request (pdf) in order to add some Public Interest Commitments to its .music bid.
Rival .Music LLC now claims that it is “outrageous and unfair for ICANN to allow this applicant to abuse the PIC process in this way” and has filed a Request for Reconsideration.
Of the eight .music bidders, these two companies are the only formal “community” applicants.
Under the rules of the new gTLD program, community applicants can avoid having to fight an auction if they win a strict Community Priority Evaluation.
To avoid confusion: DotMusic Limited is the applicant led by Constantine Roussos; .Music LLC (aka Far Further) is led by John Styll.
Far Further fought a CPE last year but lost in spectacular fashion, scoring just 3 out of the 16 available points, a long way shy of the 14 points required for a pass.
The Roussos applicant has now submitted eight new proposed Public Interest Commitments — things it promises to do to protect registrants and rights holders — as an addendum to its application.
That’s pretty standard stuff.
What’s unusual are the 308 pages of additional “clarifications” that seek to explain how the proposed PICs relate to its original application.
They’re not changes to the application, technically speaking, but they are a way to get hundreds of extra pages of content into the public record ahead of DotMusic’s own CPE.
According to Styll, this latest gambit is nothing more than an attempt to score more CPE points. He told ICANN:

the 308 additional pages of “clarifications” contain wording that clearly utilizes learnings from previous CPE results (including our own), in violation of ICANN policy

Complicating matters, it turns out that Far Further tried to make some substantive changes to its application back in May 2014, but had the request declined by ICANN “in order to be fair to other applicants”.
That was prior to ICANN’s publication of guidelines governing change request, Styll says.
Because of this alleged discrepancy between how the two competing change requests were handled, Far Further wants a second crack at the CPE for its own application.
Its RfR (pdf) asks ICANN to reverse its May 2014 decision, allow its change request, throw out the original results of its CPE and refer the CPE to a new Economist Intelligence Unit panel for a full reevaluation.
Failing that, it wants ICANN to throw out the 308 pages of “clarifications” submitted by DotMusic.
Both applicants have the written support of dozens of music industry groups.
There’s some crossover, but Far Further’s backers appear to me to be a little more “establishment” than DotMusic’s, including the likes of the Recording Industry Association of America.
The other, non-community applicants are Amazon, Google, Donuts, Radix, Famous Four Media and Entertainment Names.
With Google and Amazon in the mix, if it goes to auction, .music could easily be an eight-figure auction along the lines of .app, which sold to Google for $25 million.
In my view, winning a CPE is the only way DotMusic has a chance of getting its hands on .music, short of combining with another applicant.

2 Comments Tagged: .music, community priority evaluation, cpe, dotmusic, far further, ICANN, new gTLDs

Google wins .map and .search

Google has secured two gTLDs representing two of its core services.
The company has won .search and .map, fighting off competition from Amazon, Donuts, Famous Four Media for .search and Rightside and Amazon for .map.
All the losing bidders have now withdrawn their applications.
Both strings were due to head to ICANN auction April 29, but appear to have been settled privately instead.
That means the winning bids will not be disclosed.
Google plans to operate .map as an open gTLD in which anyone can register.
It had originally planned to keep .search domains limited to itself, until ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee and others complained about so-called “closed generics”.
Its updated .search application talks about restricting .search to sites that offer search functionality that adheres to a certain technical standard.
Specifically, domains in .search will have to follow a certain URL format (example.search/?q=query, the format used by Google itself) for queries.
It’s going to be very interesting how Google goes about implementing the plans in its application. We could be looking at some innovative or possibly controversial services.

Comment Tagged: .map, auctions, charleston road registry, google, new gTLDs, search

Cybersquatter jailed for seven years after prison break

Fraudster Neil Moore, who escaped from prison by cybersquatting, has reportedly been handed a seven-year sentence by a British court.
As we reported last month, Moore escaped from Wandsworth prison merely by sending an email ordering his release from an hmcts-gsi-gov.org.uk email address.
He’d registered the name, a typo of the genuine hmcts.gsi.gov.uk used by the UK court service, on a smuggled smartphone.
He was being held on remand for an unrelated fraud at the time.
Today’s sentencing follows Moore pleading guilty to eight counts of fraud (it doesn’t seem those were related to cybersquatting) and one count of wrongful escape from custody.

5 Comments Tagged: cybersquatting, fraud, prison