.tk passes 25 million domains

The .tk registry has become only the second TLD to pass 25 million domain names.
Netherlands-based Dot TK passed the milestone at the weekend, according to statistics posted on its web site, and today has 25,068,128 domains under management.
It’s grown by a whopping 837,703 names in the last 30 days alone.
That means Tokelau, the tiny island nation the ccTLD represents, has a nominal 17,900 domains per citizen.
The reason for the huge numbers is that .tk names are usually free to register anywhere in the world, with Dot TK using a freemium model through which it only makes money from add-on services.
.tk became the largest ccTLD last year, hitting 16.7 million names in April 2013 and passing Germany’s .de, which today has about 15.7 million domains under management.
Being free, you’d expect there to be a disproportionate amount of nefarious activity in .tk, but that does not appear to be the case any more.
The TLD doesn’t show up in the top 10 most abused TLDs in the most recent report of the Anti-Phishing Working Group (pdf).
Architelos says (pdf) it’s the 47th-safest out of 72 TLDs, scoring it better than .com, .net, .co and many other popular TLDs.

3 Comments Tagged: .tk, dot tk

That’s all folks! Final gTLD app gets approved

ICANN has finally finished evaluating all 1,930 new gTLD applications from the 2012 round.
Indian conglomerate Tata Group’s dot-brand .tata passed Extended Evaluation (pdf) on Friday, having apparently secured the non-objection of Morocco, which has a province of the same name.
Calculated from Reveal Day — June 13, 2012 — it’s taken a little over two years (765 days) for every bid to pass through first Initial Evaluation and then, if necessary, Extended Evaluation.
Calculated from the first batch of Initial Evaluation results being released, it’s 483 days.
A total of 1,783 applications passed IE. A further 38 failed, of which 35 passed EE. There have been 211 withdrawals so far and, due to contention, another 380 are expected.

5 Comments Tagged: .tata, extended evaluation, ICANN, initial evaluation, new gTLDs

Dot-brands get another year to sign ICANN contract

ICANN has offered dot-brand gTLD applicants the ability to delay the signing of their Registry Agreements until July 29, 2015, nine months later than under the former process.
The extension was offered by ICANN after talks with the Brand Registry Group, whose members felt pressured by the old deadline.
All new gTLD applicants had previously been told they had nine months to sign the contract from the date they receive a so-called “Contracting Information Request” from ICANN.
For many applicants, those CIRs were sent out many months ago, leading to an October 29 deadline.
However, Specification 13 of the contract, which allows dot-brands to opt out of things like sunrise periods and equal treatment of registrars, was not finalized by ICANN until May 14 this year.
Only a minuscule number of dot-brands eligible to sign contracts — which is pretty much all of them — have so far opted to do so.
Bearing the Spec 13 delay in mind, ICANN is now offering would-be dot-brands the July 2015 deadline instead, as long as they show “good faith” by responding to their CIR by September 1.
What this means is that dot-brands might not be hitting the internet for another year.
For non-branded gTLD registries — some of whom hope the big brands’ adoption and marketing will help the visibility of new gTLDs in general — this may be disappointing.

Comment Tagged: dot-brands, ICANN, registry agreement, specification 13

New domain scam? ICANN issues vague warning

ICANN has warned internet users about a domain name scam that exploits the ICANN name and logo.
Not giving away much information, ICANN said in a statement:

It has been brought to ICANN’s attention that some online entities have attempted to sell fraudulent “certificates”, which they claim are required to protect generic top-level domain names. The perpetuators of this scam threaten registrants on the protection service with the objective of securing a fee from the registrant. The “certificates” look official and include an unauthorized use of the ICANN logo.
Please note that ICANN does not issue certificates to registrants and does not collect fees from registrants directly.

It’s not clear whether the scam is related to the “ICANN certificates” fraudsters sometimes demand as part of domain appraisal scams, which have been well-documented online.
The reference to a “protection service” and new gTLDs suggest this might be something new.
I asked ICANN for a sample of the scam in question yesterday but haven’t heard back yet.
UPDATE: The certificates look like this:

and this:

Comment Tagged: certificates, fraud, ICANN, scam

Track all the popular new gTLD domains on DI

Want to get a full daily list of which new gTLD domains have Alexa rank?
From today DI PRO subscribers can, with our new Popular New gTLD Domains feature.
Updated once a day, the report comprises a list of new gTLD domains that are used by the top one million web sites on the internet, according to data provided by Alexa.
The report currently has 635 domains, but it’s growing.
The report can be used to discover how early adopters are using new gTLDs and which TLDs are generating the most popular web sites.
Here’s a screen shot:

DI PRO subscribers can check it out here.

1 Comment Tagged: alexa, di pro, new gTLDs, popularity

.moscow beats .москва 22-to-1 in sunrise

The concurrent sunrise periods of .moscow and .москва have unsurprisingly seen the Latin-script new gTLD trounce the Cyrillic version.
There were 154 registrations in .moscow, according to FAITID, the registry for both gTLDs, compared to just seven in .москва.
They’re both pretty low numbers, but they’re quite typical for new gTLDs. The .moscow number is actually a little above average.
And two of the IDN registrations appear to be for generic terms — мы.москва (“we.moscow”) and скачать.москва (“download.moscow”) — masquerading as trademarks, which happens a lot in new gTLDs.
There are many reasons why the Latin script beat the Cyrillic.
Sergey Gorbunov, head of international relations at FAITID, said that Russian holders of Cyrillic-script trademarks may not be very familiar with the Trademark Clearinghouse.
There are only 127 Cyrillic strings protected in the TMCH right now, he said. Non-Russian brands are also less likely to have their names protected in Cyrillic, he said.
Apple registered 11 Latin-script domains in the sunrise, according to Gorbunov, making it the biggest single registrant.
In what is possibly the longest launch phase of any new gTLD to date, there now follow two “Limited Registration Periods” for Russia and Moscow-based organizations, which end August 25.
A landrush period will kick off September 24 and FAITID expects to go to general availability on December 1.

Comment Tagged: .moscow, .МОСКВА, faitid, sunrise

The top 35 most-popular new gTLD sites

New gTLDs have been on the market for months now, and the slow process of building out sites is underway.
As regular readers and DI PRO subscribers know, one way DI tracks the popularity of domain names, and therefore their corresponding TLDs, is using Alexa rankings.
These scores are not perfect, but they’re a reasonable way to highlight which new gTLD domain names are getting traffic from internet users.
There are currently 635 new gTLD domains in Alexa’s top one million most-trafficked sites, up from just 10 when I checked almost six months ago, February 19.
Only 35 of those have a ranking better than 100,000.
I visited each in turn today to determine to what use the registrants have put their names.
In this top 35, I found two instances of apparent malware distribution and one instance of possible cybersquatting. Four returned errors. One (www.link) is a blocked name collision name.
Notably, controversial BitTorrent index The Pirate Bay, which has been TLD-hopping for many months and recently got kicked out of .guru, seems to have found a home in .uno.
Only one of the domains redirects to a domain in a different TLD.
One (gen.xyz) is a new gTLD registry’s official homepage.
The remainder represent a broad cross section of regular internet usage: blogs, tools, photos, sport, porn, get-rich-quick schemes, forums, file-hosting, and so on and so forth.
Varying degrees of professionalism can be found on these sites. Some are very pretty, others very ugly.
There’s even one site on the list that appears to be a legitimate corporate home page. On reflection, no it isn’t. It’s a Get-Rich-Quick site.
These are my results, make of them what you will.
[table id=30 /]

8 Comments Tagged: alexa, new gTLDs

.co.com launch compares well to new gTLDs

The subdomain service .co.com, which is being managed more or less like a proper gTLD, reckons it outperformed every new gTLD earlier this week.
CEO Ken Hansen and president Paul Goldstone made the claim in a couple of Facebook posts yesterday.

Hansen clarified today that while the company is not releasing precise numbers, .co.com had “single digit thousands of registrations” following its landrush, which ended July 8.
To outperform every new gTLD, .co.com would have had to have beaten .xyz, which had a relatively quiet day (for .xyz) on July 8, adding just 1,267 names.
We can assume .co.com had somewhere between 1,268 and 9,999 registrations, therefore. I’d err to the lower end of that range, personally.
Those names would have been added cumulatively over the course of the three-month landrush and the preceding sunrise.
Still, it’s not bad for a subdomain, given that many proper new gTLDs are struggling to achieve similar numbers on their launch days.

21 Comments Tagged: co.com, landrush

Momentum offers free new gTLD show passes

Momentum Events is offering brands a free pass to its upcoming Digital Strategy & DotOps Congress in Amsterdam.
The deal is only open to companies that have not already applied for a new dot-brand gTLD. Each eligible company gets one free pass for the two-day event. Additional tickets start at $299.
For applicants and others the standard price is $599 per person. That’s about half the price of previous conferences in the series, which is now in its fifth incarnation.
Previous shows have taken place in New York and London.
Confirmed speakers for Amsterdam include executives from Philips, Goodyear, Coke and Google. From the domain world, Afilias, doMEn, Donuts and Dot Luxury are due to talk.
DI, which is a nominal media sponsor of the show, may also be on a panel.
The shows were previously called the Digital Strategy & New gTLD Congress, but Momentum has switched out “New gTLD”, which perhaps caused non-domain folks’ eyes to glaze, for “DotOps”.
No, I don’t know what that means either.
The conference will take place at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Amsterdam, Netherlands from September 18 to 19.

1 Comment Tagged: dot-brands, momentum, new gTLDs

ICM scraps free .xxx porn star offer, starts new one

ICM Registry has partnered with a company called Model Centro to offer free .xxx domain names to porn performers.
Model Centro offers porn models a managed fan site and social networking service. It’s free to the models, with the company taking a 15% slice of whatever subscription fees are taken from their fans.
The arrangement seems to be related to the sale of Models.xxx, which ICM held back as a premium name until this week but which now mirrors the old modelcentro.com.
The deal will see each Models.xxx user get one free .xxx domain.
It also means ICM’s Adult Performer Program, which reserved the names of 3,500 porn stars and allowed them to be claimed for free via Name.com is no more.
The company said in a statement that the two-year-old program has been scrapped.
The new deal is probably better for .xxx. Because Models.xxx is a web site service, each free domain given away is going to turn into a site almost immediately, potentially increasingly the gTLD’s visibility.
The same group that runs Model Centro also recently acquired the premium bukkake.xxx, while another bought extreme.xxx and public.xxx. The three sold for a total of $150,000, according to the registry.

Comment Tagged: icm registry, model centro, models.xxx, name.com, xxx