Donuts explains its premium pricing strategy

Add Donuts to the list of registries planning to use .tv-style variable pricing after their new gTLDs start to go to general availability next year.
COO Richard Tindal told DI last night that each of its upcoming registries could have “two, three, four, five, six — it varies — levels of buy-it-now pricing”.
He was referring to pricing during general availability, not any of Donuts’ special launch phases.
The actual number of registry-reserved names held for auction or future promotional purposes is likely to be quite small — often under 20 names per TLD — Tindal said.
Instead, Donuts wants to get the names it has identified as “premium” to market as quickly as possible, but with a higher annual price than the base registry fee. He said:

Let’s take .clothing, that’s coming out at the moment.
There’ll be a small — very small — number of reserved names for which we may do an auction later
The vast, vast majority of the names are first-come-first-served buy-it-now — but within Donuts TLDs, at more than one price within a TLD.
So in .clothing the standard names will be one price, then there’ll be another group of names that are premium for a higher price, and another group of names that are higher still that are premiums as well, and potentially even another group.

Tindal didn’t want to give specifics, but indicated that most premiums could carry an annual fee of under $1,000.
“Your ball-park standard name is a $10, $20, $30 name, ish, retail,” he said. “And your premium name is in the hundreds of dollars a year, typically. It varies.”
“Generally, ball-park-speaking, the vast majority of our names will be well, well under $1,000 a year,” he said.
He added that the tiers should be obvious when pre-registering names at one of Donuts’ accredited registrars.
I experimented a bit on 101domain, where the base retail price for a .clothing domain is currently $34.99 a year.
I found that used.clothing and winter.clothing, for example, both carry a $400 price tag, hot.clothing and large.clothing are $49.50 each, while vintage.clothing and designer.clothing appear to be reserved.
Those are the retail prices, of course, which include the registrar’s mark-up. While they’re for pre-registered names, I’m not expecting the GA prices to be much different.
“These are very attractively priced names, in our view, even the premium ones we think are attractive to people,” Tindal said. “We want registrars to make some margin, we want registrants to have room for the value of the name to increase as well.”
He didn’t say how many names will be in the higher pricing tiers — it will vary by gTLD.
“We believe premiums will be a small percentage of names under management,” he said.
The tiers will be the same across all of Donuts TLDs, he said, but each given TLD may only use a subset. So if there are six possible tiers, .example may only use three of them.
Donuts does not currently plan to operate a “founders program” for its gTLDs, Tindal said.
“We just want to get these names out and in the hands of users,” he said. Donuts’ market is primarily small and medium sized enterprises.
Donuts is not the first to reveal tiered pricing for new gTLD names.
Top Level Domain Holdings recently laid out a similar pricing strategy. Its Minds + Machines registrar is already taking pre-registrations on names with renewal fees ranging into many thousands of dollars per yer for premium names.
What Box and Plan Bee have also started selling pre-registrations via their registrars that indicate tiered pricing.
Prior to new gTLDs, the only notable TLD with variable pricing was Verisign’s repurposed ccTLD, .tv.

8 Comments Tagged: donuts, landrush, new gTLDs, premium, sunrise, tiered pricing, variable pricing

Bing already recognizes new gTLDs (Google doesn’t)

Microsoft seems to be ahead of its rival Google when it comes to recognizing new gTLDs in their respective search engines.
Doing an advanced search for sites within specific new gTLDs on Bing is returning results today. The same cannot be said for Google, however.
Here’s an example of a search results page limited to Uniregistry’s .sexy:

The same type of search seems to work for .tattoo (Uniregistry) and .ruhr (Regiodot) but not for .uno or for any of Donuts’ many Latin-script gTLDs (which all currently redirect to donuts.co).
Sometimes the searches work with a dot, sometimes they don’t.
Searching for Donuts’ and other registries’ IDN gTLDs also seems to work in Bing, but only when you search for the A-label (eg .xn--unup4y) rather than the U-label (.游戏).
New gTLD support appears to be a work in progress at Microsoft, in other words, but the company does seem to be further along than Google, which so far doesn’t return any results for the same queries.

8 Comments Tagged: bing, google, new gTLDs

Prince Charles first to get a second-level .uk name

The household of Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales, has become one of the first bodies to receive a second-level .uk domain name, Nominet announced this morning.
The name princeofwales.uk was among four delegated to organizations that have previously used third-level .gov.uk names but which are actually independent of the UK government. Nominet said:

Nominet has delegated the new second-level .uk domain names royal.uk, princeofwales.uk, supremecourt.uk and jcpc.uk to the Royal Household, the Household of the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, the Supreme Court, and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council respectively.

These were among 69 second-level names requested by the British government for special treatment in advance of the broader Direct.uk initiative, which is due to kick of mid-2014.
The full list of government names will be published in February, Nominet said.
Under Direct.uk, registrants of .co.uk names will get five years to decide whether they want to register the matching .uk name.

2 Comments Tagged: .uk, direct.uk, nominet

The latest new gTLD passes and signings

Five new gTLD applications passed Extended Evaluation late Friday, while one more contract was signed.
Four of the five EE passes were dot-brands that had previously failed to provide ICANN with enough financial information to pass their Initial Evaluation.
They are: .mckinsey (McKinsey Holdings), .alcon (Alcon Laboratories), .cipriani (Hotel Cipriani), and .jcp (JCP Media).
The fifth was DotHome Ltd (Defender Security/CGR-Ecommerce) with .home, a bittersweet pass given that the .home gTLD is now unlikely to ever see the light of day due to name collision risks.
Also late Friday, another registry signed its Registry Agreement with ICANN. This time, it was Dai Nippon Printing with .dnp, a Japanese dot-brand.
The contract has not yet been published, but it seems unlikely to be ICANN’s newly proposed dot-brand contract, which is still open for public comment.

Comment Tagged: contracting, extended evaluation, ICANN, new gTLDs

NamesCon ticket winners selected

Over the weekend we randomly selected the five winners of free tickets to the NamesCon conference.
To enter, all you had to do was leave a comment answering the question:

What’s the best way to explain the benefits of new gTLDs to somebody from outside the domain industry?

The prizes are free conference passes to NamesCon, which runs at the Tropicana hotel in Las Vegas from January 13 to 15.
The winners were picked using the random number generator at Random.org. By screen name, they are:

1. JS
2. Tony C
3. Nic Steinbach
4. Adam Strong
5. Pat

They will be all contacted via email by DI today to arrange for ticket delivery.
Many thanks to everyone who participated. There were some interesting answers in there.

Comment Tagged: namescon, new gTLDs

No costs to registries from TM Claims extension

New gTLD registries will not have to pay any extra fees due to the Trademark Clearinghouse’s extension of the Trademark Claims service, according to the the TMCH.
When the TMCH announced a few days ago that it planned to extend Claims indefinitely — beyond the 90 days required by ICANN contract — a couple of gTLD registries asked me if it would mean more costs for them.
According to the TMCH, the answer is “no”.
The TMCH said in a statement (with my emphasis):

no additional costs will be charged to the registries
…
The Clearinghouse will create an extra interface that works separately from the existing trademark database interface for the 90 days Claims Notifications (during these 90 days registries have to pay 0.25 USD per registration when there is a successful registration matching a mark in the Clearinghouse). The 90+ interface will charge no such fee when there is an exact match.

The TMCH plans to use other means, such as scraping zone files, to provide the extended service.

2 Comments Tagged: ICANN, new gTLDs, tmch, trademarks

Blocked trademarks still eligible for Donuts sunrises

Donuts has confirmed that it is to allow trademark owners to participate in its new gTLD Sunrise periods even if their marks appear on name collisions block-lists.
The decision means that companies will be able to choose whether to grab names matching their marks during Sunrise, or take the risk that they will be released at a later date.
Donuts, like all gTLD registries, has been given block-lists for each of its TLDs. The idea is to avoid collisions with names already in use on private name-spaces behind corporate firewalls.
Lots of these blocked names match or contain well-known trademarks.
(Trademark owners can use the DI PRO collisions search engine to figure out which gTLDs have been asked to block their marks.)
While this appears at first glance to be good news for mark owners that just want their marks blocked in as many TLDs as possible, it also poses potential risks.
Blocked names are not likely to be blocked until after the first wave of Sunrise periods are over, and ICANN’s unblocking process has not yet been written.
For a company that wants to register its brand in a new gTLD, but is on a block-list, that could cause problems.
By allowing companies to participate in Sunrise regardless, Donuts is giving them a way to mitigate the risk of somebody else grabbing their brands in future.
Donuts does not plan to allow any of these names to be activated in the DNS until the ICANN collisions mitigation plan has been finalized, however.
So companies could find themselves paying for Sunrise names but unable to use them until some unspecified future date — if at all.

Comment Tagged: collisions, donuts, ICANN, new gTLDs, sunrise, trademarks

Ten more new gTLDs get ICANN contracts

.bar, .pub, .fish, .actor, .caravan, .saarland, .yokohama, .ren, .eus and .рус all have new gTLD contracts with ICANN as of yesterday.
It’s an eclectic batch of TLDs. Unusually, only one belongs to Donuts.
Of note is .caravan, which on the face of it looks like an English-language generic, but which is actually a closed, single-registrant dot-brand.
While “caravan” is an English dictionary word in the UK and Australasia, in the US it’s a 50-year-old trademark belonging to Illinois-based applicant Caravan International.
The Governmental Advisory Committee never flagged up .caravan as a “closed generic” in its Beijing Communique, so ICANN never questioned how it would be used.
However, the application states that the company plans “to reserve all names within the TLD to itself”.
What we seem to have here is a case of a dictionary word in one part of the world being captured by a single-registrant applicant due to a trademark elsewhere.
Another notable new Registry Agreement signatory is Punto 2012, which has obtained a contract for .bar.
The gTLD was originally contested, but Demand Media’s United TLD withdrew following an RFP held by the government of Montenegro, which had an effective veto over the string “Bar” due to a match with the protected name of one of its administrative regions.
I gather Montenegro will be paid in some way from the .bar registry pot.
There are also a few new geographic/cultural registries this week: .eus for the Basque people of Spain, .yokohama for a Japanese city, .saarland for a German state and the Cyrillic IDN .рус for a subset of the Russian people.
The only .brand is .ren, for the Chinese social network Renren.
The remainder are English-language generics.

7 Comments Tagged: .bar, .caravan, category 2, closed generics, gac, ICANN, montenegro, new gTLDs, trademarks

Should new gTLD objections have an appeals process?

That’s the question the ICANN Ombudsman is asking today.
Several new gTLD applicants that have lost objections — many in decisions that appear to diverge from ICANN’s rules or are inconsistent with other decisions — have been in touch to ask for redress, Ombudsman Chris LaHatte blogged this morning. He wrote:

The real problem as it seems to me, is that apart from the internal review procedures, there is no ability to seek an appeal from the panel decisions. A number of complainants had mentioned the need for an appeal process, emphasising that some of the decisions were in their view, inconsistent or not following the majority views.

LaHatte noted that his role is to decide issues of fairness in ICANN’s own decisions. As objections are all handled by third-party arbitration bodies, it’s not at all clear whether he has any authority at all over objection decisions.
Applicants have also been invoking the Reconsideration process en masse in an attempt to have successful objections overturned, but all Reconsideration requests to date have been rejected.
Reconsideration generally requires that the requester provide ICANN with new evidence that was not considered at the time of the original decision.
The ICANN Board Governance Committee, which handles Reconsideration, appears to be happy to leave objections in the hands of the arbitrators so far.
But the new gTLD objection process is a bit of a joke at the moment.
String Confusion Objection panelists have delivered inconsistent decisions, while Community Objection and Limited Public Interest Objection panels often seem to be making up rules as they go.
So should ICANN have an appeals process? If one is created it will undoubtedly be broadly used.

1 Comment Tagged: ICANN, new gTLDs, objections, Ombudsman

Islamic states to “officially object” to .islam

The Organization for Islamic Cooperation has decided to “file an official objection to the use of gTLDs .Islam and .Halal”, following a summit of 56 foreign ministers.
In a resolution (pdf) from the OIC’s high-level summit in Guinea this week, the organization also said it will become “an effective member” of ICANN, closely monitoring its work.
As previously reported, ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee was unable to reach a consensus to object to .islam and .halal, leaving it to ICANN’s board of directors to decide whether to approve them.
The OIC’s resolution is expected to become an important input to that decision-making process, after GAC chair Heather Dryden asked ICANN to take note of the Guinea meeting’s output.
The resolution also calls for the OIC to investigate how to run its own Islamic gTLDs.
The OIC has of course missed the boat by several months if it wants to file an objection to these gTLDs within the rules of the new gTLD program.
Instead, it’s going to have to hope that its entreaties to the ICANN board will be effective.

Comment Tagged: .halal, .islam, asia green, gac, ICANN, new gTLDs, oic