First eight gTLDs have 26,000 names so far

Well, we now have a new gTLD domain name market.
After n years of debate, policy-making, delay, application, testing, delegation and newfangled launch processes, there are eight new gTLDs that are open for business.
Donuts yesterday opened up its first seven gTLDs to their ‘proper’ general availability — by which I mean landrush pricing is no longer applicable.
At more or less the same time its second seven — .lighting, .equipment, .graphics, .photography, .camera, .estate, and .gallery exited their sunrise periods and went into their Early Access Program.
Meanwhile, dotShabaka Registry’s شبكة. (“.web” in Arabic) came out of its more opaque landrush period with several hundred new registrations.
Together, these 15 gTLDs have 26,199 registrations so far, based on the names active in their zone files today. The eight fully live gTLDs have 25,575, almost half of which belong to Donuts’ .guru.
[table id=25 /]
The zone files are generated at about 0100 UTC and therefore do not represent the full first day of Donuts newly-GA gTLDs, but it’s clear that .guru is the domainer’s favorite so far.
The numbers are a long way off pretty much every new TLD launch we’ve seen to date.
Compare to .mobi, which had over 110,000 names at the end of its first week; .co, which sold 216,159 in its first 16 hours; or .xxx, which sold 55,367 names on day one.
Even Radix said it sold 4,000 .pw names in its first three hours and 50,000 in the first three weeks.
It should also be pointed out that none of the Donuts gTLD numbers include purchases of Domain Protected Marks List blocks, which do not show up in zone files.
That fact eliminates much of the noise from defensive registrations that we see in almost every other TLD.
For buyers (as opposed to blockers) market conditions are obviously different now too — a single TLD launching was once an event, the temporary alleviation of scarcity, whereas today Donuts alone expects to launch half a dozen every week for months.
And the Latin strings that have been launched so far don’t exactly capture the imagination, with .guru the possible exception.
Donuts’ portfolio, in my view, is based more on securing greenfield opportunities in vertical markets (plumbing, cameras, etc) rather than mining domain investors’ wallets on launch day.
One of the keys to the success of these things longer term is going to be how much use they get — when internet users start visiting new gTLD sites and seeing new gTLD URLs on billboards, momentum will build.

15 Comments Tagged: donuts, dotshabaka, eap, early access program, landrush, new gTLDs

Donuts made about $750,000 from landrush so far

Donuts managed to sell well over $500,000 in new gTLD domain names over the first six days of its Early Access Program, according to our calculations.
Our estimate, which is somewhere between back-of-the-envelope and hard analysis, is based on the latest zone files for its first seven live gTLDs — .bike, .clothing, .guru, .ventures, .holdings, .plumbing and .singles.
The exact number I believe is somewhere closer to $750,000, but it’s actually quite difficult to pin down the exact value of domains sold to date due to the complexity of the Donuts pricing scheme.
Zone files show that as of last night Donuts had sold at least 3,650 names across all seven of its new gTLDs currently on the market.
That’s including sunrise sales and the first six days of the novel EAP, which saw buy-now prices decrease every day for a week, but not including its Domain Protected Marks List blocks.
My revenue estimates are for EAP only, ignoring sunrise.
Donuts’ EAP fee started off at $10,000 on January 30, then was reduced to $2,500, $950, $500 and $100 every day. It’s been at $100 for the last few days and will revert to baseline prices tomorrow at 1600 UTC.
So by figuring out the registration date you can figure out how much the name sold for, kinda.
Domain Name Wire managed to establish last week that the company sold six three domains at $10,000.
Based on a few hundred additional Whois look-ups, DI has found that the company sold at least 120 names during EAP at at least $500 each, at least 150 at at least $950, and at least 25 at at least $2,500.
That would bring the total haul for the first few days of EAP fees to about $300,000.
Add all this to roughly $200,000 worth of names that have appeared in the zone files since the fee dropped to $100, and we get to about $500,000 in total EAP fees, not including sunrise names.
Add in the baseline registry fees and you get to something like $550,000.
However, Donuts has also priced many attractive names at a “baseline” premium. That means when regular pricing commences tomorrow, premiums will still cost more than regular names in each TLD.
A registrant told us today that gun.guru will costs him about $400 a year to renew. That’s the baseline price. Judging by the date, he paid $950 in EAP fees and Go Daddy’s registrar markup too.
There’s no way to easily figure out what the premium pricing was after a domain has already been sold, which makes it difficult to calculate Donuts’ landrush windfall, but I believe it’s in the region of $750,000 so far, with a day yet to run.
It’s an estimate of the revenue from EAP’s first six days, only counting first-year fees.
It also requires the same caveats as usual: we’re using zone file data here, which does not present a full picture of the number of names sold.
If the pricing scheme seems confusing to you, you’re not alone.
There wasn’t a great deal of participation by registrars in the EAP, due to concerns about the high prices, implementation work, and complexity causing confusion among customers.

@DomainIncite Mostly because the pricing is confusing to customers. We'll roll them out in search along with other extensions on the 5th.

— Hover CS (@hoverCS) January 29, 2014

@DomainIncite The amount of customization required for the EAP & high cost does not make it feasible to market / implement.

— Lexsynergy Limited (@LexsynergyLtd) January 29, 2014

Several registrars seem to be treating tomorrow’s price drop as the “proper” general availability launch date for the seven gTLDs concerned.
Go Daddy, which has had new gTLDs in its storefront for the last couple months, seems to have got the majority of registrations, as you might expect. Almost a quarter of names appearing in zone files over two days last week were registered via its Domains By Proxy privacy service.
That said, its Super Bowl commercials on Sunday do not appear to have made a significant impact, focused as they were on branding Go Daddy rather than any TLD offering.

15 Comments Tagged: .guru, donuts, eap, early access program, go daddy, landrush, new gTLDs

Meet the first new gTLD domainer

Gary Schultheis has bought hundreds of new gTLD domain names already and plans to buy thousands more this year.
The former venture capitalist doesn’t consider himself a domainer, but analysis of Whois records and zone files over the weekend shows he very likely spent more than anyone on Donuts’ seven newly launched gTLDs.
At one point he owned about 10% of the .guru zone.
Schultheis’ new company, ii.org, is betting big — and long-term — on being able to sell from a large a portfolio of new gTLD names, he told DI today.
Right now, his investments are concentrated on .guru, where he says he’s picked up “hundreds” of names already.
DI research shows ii.org spent roughly $30,000 on a couple dozen generic .guru names in a single day last week, including exercise.guru, medical.guru, socialmedia.guru and divorce.guru.
“We’re not from the domain industry,” Schultheis said. “Folks I’m working with are either from the financial industry or the data industry. We’re looking at this from a smart, data-driven, black-box methodology.”
Most recently, Schultheis was president of TLO.com, a company that provided background research and risk management data services. He says that’s informed his strategy with ii.org.
“I like to take vast amounts of data and make decisions based on actual data, rather than speculation and guesses,” he said. “We may buy one-offs based on news-driven events but we try not to act emotionally.”
He’d rather not talk about the specifics of the company’s algorithms, but said they were tested out to create a portfolio of .com names, with mixed results.
Flipping some of these .com names will provide operating revenue, he said, adding that he has access to potentially millions of dollars in funding due to his previous work.
“If we have some .com’s that are industry or location specific, we have enough confidence we can sell those easily for cash flow,” he said.
“Our strategy is not to buy a million dollar domain and try to sell it for two million dollars, we’re going to buy things that will turn quick or have the potential for a massive multiple in future.”
But revenue from new gTLD sales may not come for years, he said.
“We have a five-to-ten year window on these and don’t care if we don’t sell any of these for years,” he said.
With that in mind, part of the risk of investing in “premium” strings with Donuts — which has earmarked many generic words for higher renewal pricing — is the high carrying cost.
“Click traffic is not going cover the renewal costs of these name,” Schultheis said. “gun.guru is going to cost me $400 a year to carry.”
Schultheis said as a venture capitalist in the 1990s he became aware of .com names and started buying up his own. That became International Internet Inc, which was publicly listed in the late 1990s.
Schultheis said the company (from which ii.org gets its name) was worth a billion dollars at one point, though it seems to have gone out of business around the same time as the .com bubble burst.
Now, he reckons new gTLD names will start to acquire Google juice before long.
“We own computer.guru,” he said. “If you type in ‘computer’ into Google now I believe .com’s will outrank it, but I believe over time that with the Google algorithm becoming more specific when you type in ‘computer’ as it relates to an expert it’s possible we could be as strong as .com.”
Of the seven ASCII gTLDS currently on the open market, .guru is the only one ii.org has touched. Schultheis said. In future, he intends to concentrate on where he feels the big-money buyers are.
“We’re very interested in some of the city names,” he said. “But ones like .sexy and .ninja are more for a college-age person, and I don’t feel that the audience there will show the return we’re looking for.”
By contrast .guru speaks to executive types and companies with money to spend, he said.
Without naming names, he said some other gTLDs confuse him.
“With some of these TLDs we really scratch our head and say ‘What were they thinking?'” he said. “There are dozens of these things where I don’t know how they’re going to pay the bills.”
As for ii.org’s outlook, Schultheis said its portfolio is going to be a mix of assets that he thinks could be sold quick and others that are long-term plays.
“We know we’re early. Everyone wishes they could go back to early 90s and buy up all the .coms they could,” he said. “But I also own some .mobi’s so I know you can also be wrong.”

21 Comments Tagged: .guru, donuts, ii.org

Nominet names the date for shorter .uk addresses

Nominet is to start selling .uk domain names at the second level for the first time on June 10 this year.
The controversial Direct.uk service will enable people to register example.uk names, rather than example.co.uk names.
If you already own a .co.uk name, you’ll get five years to register the matching .uk before it is released into the pool of available names.
Nominet has created a new web site to market the sea-change in how .uk names are administered.

1 Comment Tagged: .uk, direct.uk, nominet

TLDH raises $33.6m to fight new gTLD auctions

Top Level Domain Holdings has raised £21 million with an institutional investor share placement to help it win some new gTLD contention set auctions.
Its total war chest following the $33.6 million-ish placement will be about $63 million, albeit with $15 million of that earmarked for a single, as-yet-unspecified auction.
The company is currently in 43 contention sets, most of which it apparently wants to resolve via private auction. TLDH said in a statement:

The Company believes private auctions provide a significant opportunity for the Company both to increase the number of high-value gTLDs within its portfolio and to generate cash from those gTLDs which it chooses to relinquish. Under the private auction process, the winning bid is divided equally and paid to the losing applicants net of the auctioneer’s fees.

As part of TLDH’s transition from a revenue-free penny stock to a trading company, it’s going to change its name to Minds + Machines Limited, via a reverse takeover of its subsidiary of the same name.
The company said the move will help with “stakeholder communications and branding”.
Finally, TLDH said that founding director Guy Elliott is to leave its board of directors and be replaced by new non-executive director Elliot Noss. Noss is of course CEO of rival registry/registrar Tucows.

Comment Tagged: auctions, m+m, Minds + Machines, new gTLDs, tldh, top level domain holdings, tucows

First Donuts new gTLD sunrise periods looking tiny

It’s possible that fewer than 1,200 domain names were registered in Donuts’ first seven new gTLD sunrise periods, judging by the latest zone file data.
According to Donuts zone files dated January 31, just 1,164 proper domain names currently exist in .clothing, .bike, .guru, .ventures, .holdings, .singles and .plumbing.
By TLD, the names break down like this:

.clothing — 560
.holdings — 166
.bike — 146
.ventures — 125
.guru — 117
.singles — 50
.plumbing — 44.

As far as I can tell, based on sample Whois lookups, all the names were registered during the gTLDs’ respective sunrise periods, not during the currently ongoing Early Access Program.
On the face of it, these look like very small sunrise periods indeed (consider .co, which had 11,000 registrations during its sunrise in 2011) but there are number of important caveats here.
First, this data might be wrong. There have been hiccups and glitches in registry zone file provision for weeks, and this might be one of those cases. I don’t think it is, but you never know.
Second, the data might be still incomplete. Names were to be allocated after the conclusion of Donuts end-date sunrise, which was January 24. Not all of these domains might have been allocated yet.
Third, these numbers don’t reflect “dark” domains. These are domain names that are not configured with name servers and therefore won’t show up in DNS zone files.
Fourth, and most importantly, domain names that have been blocked by trademark holders under Donuts’ parallel Domain Protected Marks List service do not show up in zone files.
DPML is the Donuts offering to trademark owners that drastically reduces the cost of blocking a mark — potentially to just a few dollars per domain per year — across all of the company’s gTLDs.
We already know from a bit of Whois detective work by World Trademark Review that the likes of Microsoft, Apple, Wal-Mart and Samsung blocked their brands across all seven of these TLDs.
DPML is a bit of a bargain if you’re dead-set on blocking your brand in as many TLDs as possible, and it’s possible — maybe even likely — that the number of DPML subscriptions outstripped actual sunrise registrations.
It’s a given that most valuable brands are more interested in preventing misuse than they are in participating in the new gTLD expansions — Microsoft has no use for microsoft.plumbing.
Judging by the zone files, domains registered during sunrise are largely appropriate to the gTLD — .clothing and .bike are full of clothing and biking brands, with very little crossover between the two, for example.
But there are plenty of exceptions to that rule.
Some other stuff I noticed
I had a dig through the files and did a few Whois look-ups whenever I saw a name that piqued my interest.
There are no hugely obvious examples of widespread gaming to be seen but some arguably generic names did go to some domain industry folk who have inside knowledge of the new gTLD program.
Notably, several people associated with new gTLD applications managed by Beverly Hills IP lawyer Thomas Brackey of Freund & Brackey seem to have picked up nice-looking generic domains during sunrise.
Luxury Partners of .luxury managed to get its hands on domains including luxury.clothing, for example, while What Box?, which applied for six gTLDs, grabbed realestate.guru and wedding.guru.
That’s right, apparently there are trademarks on “real estate” and “wedding” somewhere out there, and domain registry What Box? was able to provide the required proof that it’s using them in commerce.
Brackey himself is listed as the registrant of cloud.guru and direct.[tld] across the seven gTLDs, among others.
George Minardos of .build applicant Minardos Group acquired build.guru during sunrise too.
I wonder if any sunrise names will be challenged under Donuts’ Sunrise Dispute Resolution Policy.
While .guru has only attracted 117 registered names so far, it does appear to be the one place notoriously domain-shy Apple decided to actually play, presumably due to the support “gurus” it employs in its stores — ipad.guru, mac.guru and iphone.guru all went to the company.
There’s a “religious” flavor to some of the registrations there too — scientology.guru and darshan.guru were both registered by their respective organizations.
Amazon appears to be the most sunrise-happy of all registrants, grabbing dozens of (probably) useless names including kindle.plumbing, prime.ventures and aws.bike.
Some porn publishers seem to have gone a bit crazy too, with names such as m4m.plumbing and cam4.clothing making an appearance.
I found a few domains on my trawl that appear to have empty Whois records — christ.holdings and ghost.bike to name two amusingly appropriate examples — which doesn’t seem to be in the spirit of sunrise.
So there are definitely some oddities out there, but so far it does not appear to me based on my first look that massive numbers of trademark owners have been held to ransom, nor does there appear to have been any wholesale gaming of the system.

23 Comments Tagged: .bike, .clothing, .guru, .holdings, .plumbing, .singles, .ventures, donuts, freund & brackey, luxury partners, new gTLDs, sunrise, trademarks, what box

Directi joins Domain.com family in $100m deal

Endurance International, the holding company behind brands such as Domain.com and HostGator has closed the acquisition of top ten registrar Directi and some related companies.
The acquisition, which was announced last September is worth between $100 million and $110 million — $25.5 million in cash and the rest in shares and a promissory note.
The deal includes Directi properties BigRock (a registrar), ResellerClub (the reseller-focused registrar), LogicBoxes (the registrar management service) and webhosting.info.
It does not include Radix Registry, the company that applied for 31 new gTLDs, 28 of which applications are still active.
Directi CEO Bhavin Turakhia “has agreed to be closely involved in the integration of the two companies”, but it doesn’t sound like he’s taking on a permanent role at Endurance.
Endurance may not be a familiar brand in and of itself, but its businesses include Bluehost, HostGator, Domain.com, FatCow, iPage and Mojo Marketplace.

Comment Tagged: acquisition, directi, endurance, new gTLDs, radix

EU body tells ICANN that 2013 RAA really is illegal

A European Union data protection body has told ICANN for a second time — after being snubbed the first — that parts of the 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement are in conflict with EU law.
The Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, which is made up of the data protection commissioners in all 28 EU member states, reiterated its claim in a letter (pdf) sent earlier this month.
In the letter, the Working Party takes issue with the part of the RAA that requires registrars to keep hold of customers’ Whois data for two years after their registrations expire. It says:

The Working Party’s objection to the Data Retention Requirement in the 2013 RAA arises because the requirement is not compatible with Article 6(e) of the European Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC which states that personal data must be:
“kept in a form which permits identification of data subjects for no longer than is necessary for the purposes for which the data were collected”
The 2013 RAA fails to specify a legitimate purpose which is compatible with the purpose for which the data was collected, for the retention of personal data of a period of two years after the life of a domain registration or six months from the relevant transaction respectively.

Under ICANN practice, any registrar may request an opt out of the RAA data retention clauses if they can present a legal opinion to the effect that to comply would be in violation of local laws.
The Working Party told ICANN the same thing in July last year, clearly under the impression that its statement would create a blanket opinion covering all EU-based registrars.
But a week later ICANN VP Cyrus Namazi told ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee that the Working Party was “not a legal authority” as far as ICANN is concerned.
The Working Party is clearly a bit miffed at the snub, telling ICANN this month:

The Working Party regrets that ICANN does not acknowledge our correspondence as written guidance to support the Waiver application of a Registrar operating in Europe.
…
the Working Party would request that ICANN accepts the Working Party’s position as appropriate written guidance which can accompany a Registrar’s Data Retention Waiver Request.

It points out that the data protection commissioners of all 28 member states have confirmed that the letter “reflects the legal position in their member state”.
ICANN has so far processed one waiver request, made by the French registrar OVH, as we reported earlier this week.
Weirdly, the written legal opinion used to support the OVH request is a three-page missive by Blandine Poidevin of the French law firm Jurisexpert, which cites the original Working Party letter heavily.
It also cites letters from CNIL, the French data protection authority, which seem to merely confirm the opinion of the Working Party (of which it is of course a member).
EU registrars seem to be in a position here where in order to have the Working Party’s letter taken seriously by ICANN, they have to pay a high street lawyer to endorse it.

3 Comments Tagged: 2013 raa, article 29 working party, cnil, data retention, ICANN, ovh, privacy

Moment of truth as first seven new gTLDs go on sale

We’re finally going to see if there’s any demand for new gTLD domain names.
The first seven new gTLDs — .bike, .clothing, .guru, .holdings, .plumbing, .singles and .ventures, all operated by Donuts — hit first-come, first-served general availability this afternoon.
I understand that the precise time they’re due to become available is 1600 UTC.
But these are going to be unlike any new TLD launches we’ve seen to date.
We’re unlikely to see the kind of mad gold-rush that was enjoyed by the likes of .mobi and .co in their first 24 hours, largely due to the high prices Donuts intends to charge for early adopters.
Under its Early Access Program, any domain registered in these TLDs on day one is going to cost over $10,000 for the first year. The price will come down to $2,500+ tomorrow and will be reduced each day until settling at regular pricing a week from now.
Go Daddy, which commands about half of the retail market, has previously indicated that its day one pricing for Donuts’ gTLDs will be $12,539.
Judging by the Go Daddy web site today, it’s treating EAP as one of its “priority pre-registration” phases distinct from general availability, which it says will kick off February 5.

The EAP is Donuts’ alternative to the landrush-with-auctions model we’ve become accustomed to in previous TLD launches.
The questions are whether this will affect domain investors’ willingness to dive in and grab some premium real estate and whether it will encourage actual end-users to register early.
It seems pretty obvious that while day one of GA for Donuts’ gTLDs is the first big test of its pricing strategy, it’s not going to be the yardstick for volume performance that we’ve seen in previous launches.
I think it’s a pretty safe bet that today’s volumes for Donuts will not come close to GA-day numbers for the likes of .co, .xxx or .mobi, which were in the five or six-figure range.
But with pricing for .bike et al today literally 200 times more expensive than .xxx’s GA pricing, Donuts doesn’t need to sell a great many names to have made a nice return.
ICM Registry said it sold 55,367 .xxx domains in the first 24 hours of GA back in December 2011. With a registry fee of $62, that’s revenue of $3.43 million to the company.
To make the same amount of money from a single gTLD such as .guru, with its $10,000 (I believe) registry fee, Donuts only needs to sell 343 domains today.
.CO Registry sold 194,000 domains in its first 24 hours, at a registry fee I believe was $20, for approximately $3.88 million in revenue. Donuts would only need to sell 388 .clothing domains to make the same return.
These might be achievable numbers. .CO, which operated a landrush-with-auctions period, sold at least 38 domains for over $10,000 and 227 for over $2,500, based on its published results.
Volume matters for the long-term health of a gTLD with public visibility and an aftermarket, but not so much anymore for the financial health of the registry itself.
UPDATE: An earlier version of this story reported that the premium EAP prices recur for every year of the registration. They actually revert back to standard Donuts pricing in the second year.

11 Comments Tagged: donuts, early access program, go daddy, landrush, new gTLDs

First European registrar to get Whois data opt-out

ICANN plans to give a French registrar the ability to opt out of parts of the 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement due to data privacy concerns.
OVH, the 14th-largest registrar of gTLD domains, asked ICANN to waive parts of the RAA that would require it to keep hold of registrant Whois data for two years after it stops having a relationship with the customer.
The company asked for the requirement to be reduced to one year, based on a French law and a European Union Directive.
ICANN told registrars last April that they would be able to opt-out of these rules if they provided a written opinion from a local jurist opining that to comply would be illegal.
OVH has provided such an opinion and now ICANN, having decided on a preliminary basis to grant the request, is asking for comments before making a final decision.
If granted, it would apply to “would apply to similar waivers requested by other registrars located in the same jurisdiction”, ICANN said.
It’s not clear if that means France or the whole EU — my guess is France, given that EU Directives can be implemented in different ways in different member states.
Throughout the 2013 RAA negotiation process, data privacy was a recurring concern for EU registrars. It’s not just a French issue.
ICANN has more details, including OVH’s request and links for commenting, here.

Comment Tagged: 2013 raa, data retention, ICANN, ovh, privacy, whois