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Kickstarter launches Patreon rival on .RIP domain hack

Kevin Murphy, November 15, 2017, Domain Sales

They’re deadly serious.
Crowdfunding service Kickstarter has relaunched its Drip subscriptions service on a .rip domain.
It’s a domain hack using a single-character domain: d.rip.
It’s actually a case of a migration away from a .com domain, which is not something you see every day from a major online brand.
Drip was acquired by Kickstarter from record company Ghostly International in 2012 and has had a relatively low-key presence at drip.kickstarter.com.
Rather than enabling creators to fund a project entirely in advance, with an “all-or-nothing” approach, it allows them to collect subscription fees from fans.
It’s aimed at musicians, podcasters, comedians, YouTubers and the like — people who need a way to support their work now that advertisers are increasingly wary of edgy online content.
The .rip gTLD was originally a Rightside domain. It’s now in the Donuts stable.
It was intended to stand for Rest In Peace, giving registrants a memorable name with which to memorialize the dead.
In reality, with under 3,000 names in its zone, it’s used for a wide variety of other purposes too. Some sites use it to represent “rip” as a verb, others use it to evoke a sense of horror.
As a single-character registry premium name, d.rip would not have been cheap. However, it would have been certainly a lot cheaper than Drip.com, which is in use by an email marketing company.