ShortDot drops premium fees on millions of domains

New gTLD registry ShortDot says it is making 2.4 million “premium” domains available at its standard registry fee.

From September 1, domains across .bond, .cfd, .icu, .cyou and .sbs will no longer have premium renewals.

The company said that “first and last names, city names, dictionary terms, and more” will return to standard prices, but it appears that it’s the mainly lower-tier inventory, where retail prices can be currently as low as $15 a year, being released.

Judging by the list, it appears that the vast majority of domains are four-character LLLL strings and three, four and five-digit numerics (including US zip codes).

Some geographic names representing low-population areas are on the list, while larger, more well-known cities do not appear to be.

A full spreadsheet of the names can be downloaded from Dropbox here.

ShortDot bought another gTLD. Guess what .sbs stands for now?

Growing new gTLD portfolio registry ShortDot has acquired another unwanted dot-brand, .sbs, which it intends to repurpose as an open, generic TLD.

.sbs was originally owned by SBS, for Special Broadcasting Service, an Australian public-service broadcaster. But the company never used it.

Now, while launch plans are still in development, ShortDot intends to relaunch .sbs to mean something entirely different, much as it recently did with .cfd.

“.sbs will be branded as shorthand for ‘Side by Side’, perfect for social causes, charitable organizations and other philanthropic initiatives,” ShortDot COO Kevin Kopas told us.

That does not appear to be a meaning of the acronym in common usage.

ShortDot is currently two weeks away from general availability for its next most-recent acquisition, .cfd, which originally stood for the financial term “contracts for difference” but is now being marketed as “clothing and fashion design”.

The company, best known for high-volume .icu, which has sold and lost over five million registrations over the last two years, now has five gTLDs in its stable, including unused dot-brand .bond and .cyou.

Donuts acquires four more gTLDs, but allows one to be scrapped

Donuts has acquired a portfolio of four finance-related new gTLDs, according to a source familiar with the matter, but is allowing a fifth string to fall onto the scrap heap of history.

I’m told Donuts will soon take over the ICANN contracts for .markets, .forex, .broker and .trading, which were all part of the Boston Ivy stable.

But its appears that Boston Ivy couldn’t find a buyer for .spreadbetting, which describes a complex form of gambling used in sports and financial markets, and has filed with ICANN to instead terminate its Registry Agreement.

You’ll recall that earlier this month I reported that ShortDot has acquired .cfd from Boston Ivy and plans to market it as “clothing and fashion design”, rather than its originally intended purpose of “contracts for difference”.

Both .spreadbetting and .cfd were unlaunched — both represent controversial forms of financial instrument — but the ones Donuts is acquiring already have a small number of registrations and active sites.

.markets, .forex, .trading and .broker have fewer than 4,000 registered names between them and appear to retail for between $17 and $50 per year.

I’ve lost track of precisely how many gTLD contracts Donuts currently controls, what with its recent acquisitions, but I’m pretty sure it’s pushing 300.

As for Boston Ivy, it’s game over as far as being a gTLD registry is concerned. Its only other string was .nadex, and it terminated that over a year ago.

ShortDot adds fourth gTLD to its stable, plans March launch

Another unused new gTLD has changed hands, ending up at ShortDot, the registry best-known for high-volume .icu.

ShortDot confirmed to DI today that it has acquired .cfd from its former owner, DotCFD.

The original plan for .cfd, one of the Boston Ivy collection of investment-related new gTLD applications, was for it to represent CFDs, or “contracts for difference”, a risky type of financial instrument that has proved sufficiently controversial that they’re not even legal in the US.

Since 2012, when the string was first applied for, CFDs have come in for serious criticism from market regulators and others due to the risk of significant losses they present to retail investors.

No .cfd domains have ever been sold, and it doesn’t appear to have ever properly launched, even though it’s been in the DNS root for five years.

But ShortDot COO Kevin Kopas tells me the plan is to repurpose the domain for an entirely different market.

“When we were contemplating the purchase and subsequent marketing angle we found that the traditional meaning of a CFD in the finance world doesn’t have the most positive connotation to it,” he said.

“We’re branding .cfd for the Clothing & Fashion Design industry and will be marketing it to entrepreneurs, bloggers, vloggers and others that are on the cutting edge of the fashion industry,” he said.

If that sounds like a stretch, you’re probably right — as far as I can tell, the fashion industry has never used that acronym and creating demand there will be a tall order. We’re in “professional web” territory here.

But Kopas said that ShortDot is already working with some influencers in the space “to create some pioneer cases that will go live at launch”. It’s also planning to attend fashion industry events after pandemic travel restrictions are over.

The company is planning to launch the domain with a first-come, first-served sunrise period beginning March 10 and ending April 12. General availability is slated for April 13 with a seven day early access period.

It’s the fourth unwanted gTLD ShortDot has acquired, repurposed and relaunched.

Its biggest success to date is .icu, a low-cost domain that proved popular almost exclusively in China and currently has 2.5 million domains in its zone file (down from a peak of 6.3 million less than a year ago).

ShortDot has shifted, then lost, so many .icu domains over the last two years that you’ve really got to factor out its influence if you want to get any sensible picture of what the new gTLD industry’s growth looks like.

It also runs .bond (2,500 names in its zone today) and .cyou (with 65,000).