Donuts to launch .contact next week

Almost a year and a half after buying it, Donuts is ready to launch its newest gTLD, .contact.

According to ICANN records, the sunrise period for the domain will run from September 29 to November 28.

Registrars report that general availability will begin December 9. Retail pricing is expected to be competitive with .com.

Donuts will also run its traditional Early Access Period, from December 2, a week during which prices start very high and decline day by day.

It will be an unrestricted space, as it Donuts’ wont, and I imagine the suggested use case is something similar to the .tel model — the publication of contact information.

Donuts acquired .contact from Top Level Spectrum for an undisclosed amount in April 2019.

Donuts rolls out free phishing attack protection for all registrants

Donuts is offering registrants of domains in its suite of new gTLDs free protection from homograph-based phishing attacks.

These are the attacks where a a bad guy registers a domain name visually similar or identical to an existing domain, with one or more characters replaced with an identical character in a different script.

An example would be xn--ggle-0nda.com, which can display in browser address bars as “gοοgle.com”, despite having two Cyrillic characters that look like the letter O.

These domains are then used in phishing attacks, with bad actors attempting to farm passwords from unsuspecting victims.

Under Donuts’ new service, called TrueNames, such homographs would be blocked at the registry level at point of sale at no extra cost.

Donuts said earlier this year that it intended to apply this technology to all current and future registrations across its 250-odd TLDs.

The company has been testing the system at its registrar, Name.com, and reckons the TrueNames branding in the shopping cart can lead to increased conversions and bigger sales of add-on services.

It now wants other registrars to sign up to the offering.

It’s not Donuts’ first foray into this space. Its trademark-protection service, Domain Protected Marks List, which has about 3,500 brands in it, has had homograph protection for a few years.

But now it appears it will be free for all customers, not just deep-pocketed defensive registrants.

CSC removes reference to “retiring” new gTLD domain after retiring new gTLD domain

The corporate registrar and new gTLD management consultant CSC Global has ditched a new gTLD domain in favor of a .com, but edited its announcement after the poor optics became clear.

In a brief blog post this week, the company wrote:

We’re retiring cscdigitalbrand.services to give you a more user-friendly interface at cscdbs.com.

From the trusted provider of choice for Forbes Global 2000 companies, this more user-friendly site is filled with information you need to secure and protect your brand. You’ll experience a brand new look and feel, at-a-glance facts and figures, learn about the latest digital threats, access our trusted resources, and see what our customers are saying.

Visit the site to learn more about our core solutions: domain management, domain security, and brand and fraud protection.

But the current version of the post expunges the first paragraph, referring to the retirement of its .services domain, entirely.

I’m going to guess this happened after OnlineDomain reported the move.

But the original text is still in the blog’s cached RSS feed at Feedly.

It’s perhaps not surprising that CSC would not want to draw attention to the fact that it’s withdrawn to a .com from a .services, the gTLD managed by Donuts.

After all, CSC manages dozens of new gTLDs for clients including Apple, Yahoo and Home Depot, and releases quarterly reports tracking and encouraging activation of dot-brands.

Interestingly, and I’m veering a little off-topic here, there is a .csc new gTLD but CSC does not own it. It was delegated to a company called Computer Sciences Corporation (ironically through an application managed by CSC rival MarkMonitor) which also owns csc.com.

Computer Sciences Corporation never really got around to using .csc, and in 2017 merged with a unit of HP to form DXC Technology.

If you visit nic.csc today, you’ll be redirected to dxc.technology/nic, which bears a notice that it’s the “registry for the .dxc top-level domain”.

Given that the .dxc top-level domain doesn’t actually exist, I think this might make DXC the first company to openly declare its intent to go after a dot-brand in the next round of new gTLDs.

Donuts kicks down .place fences after attempt at innovation

Donuts has made its temporarily restricted gTLD .place unrestricted once again, two years after announcing it would be taking a stab at some technological innovation.

.place has been under lockdown for two years as Donuts planned to use it in “geofencing” applications developed by a startup it had invested in.

Geofencing is the practice of dividing the world up into three dimensional GPS-based chunks, placing those chunks into a registry, then selling them to businesses and others.

The idea was that each .place domain would be linked to a specific geofenced area. Mick could register mickscafe.place and assign the coordinates of his cafe to that domain.

In 2018, Donuts started telling registrars not to sell .place domains until its partner, Geo.Network, had launched its applications. It had invested an undisclosed sum in Geo.Network in 2016, when it was known as GeoFrenzy.

But these applications do not appear to have yet surfaced, and Donuts is now letting anyone register .place names for $10 a pop.

Since the 2018 freeze, the number of registered .place domains has tumbled from about 7,500 to about 3,800. Donuts says it has a 63% renewal rate and that 26% of its names are in active use.

The latest industry C-suite musical chairs

There have been several top-level hires at big new gTLD players in the last week.
Donuts has announced it has appointed Mina Neuberg as chief marketing officer. Neuberg appears to be a newcomer to the domain industry, having most recently worked at a learning software company called Revolution Math. It’s the first time has had a named top marketing exec on its web site since VP Judith McGarry left a year ago.
Her appointment follows February’s announcement that Donuts hired Randy Haas as chief financial officer. He was previously CFO of Rhapsody/Napster, the online music company.
Meanwhile, Shayan Rostam has moved from Intercap Holdings, the registry for .inc, .dealer and .box, where he was chief registry officer, to portfolio registry Uniregistry, where he will be chief growth officer, a newly created position.
And DNW is reporting that new gTLD registry MMX has made two new C-level hires, both coming from Uniregistry: Vaughn Lilely has been recruited as chief growth officer while Ben Anderson is coming in as chief operating officer.

Ten years ago I predicted Oscar winners wanted a .movie gTLD. Was I right?

Almost 10 years ago, when DI was barely a month old, I looked at that year’s Oscar nominees and predicted that a .movie gTLD could find some demand in the movie industry. Was I right?
Of course I was. As regular readers know, I’m always right. Apart from those times I’m wrong.
In 2010, there was no .movie gTLD and no publicly announced applications, but I noted at the time that almost half of the 50 nominated movies that year included the word “movie” immediately before the dot.
This year, there were 52 nominated movies across all categories (I’m well aware that this is a pretty small sample size to draw any conclusions from, but this post is just a bit of fun) so one might reasonably expect there to be roughly 25 official sites using .movie domains among them.
There are not. Only nine of the films, including four of the nine Best Picture nominees, use freshly registered .movie domains for their official sites.
These include the likes of 1917.movie, thecave.movie, joker.movie, onceuponatimeinhollywood.movie and littlewomen.movie.
.movie, managed by Donuts, has been around since August 2015. It competes with Motion Picture Domain Registry’s .film, which was not used by any of this year’s Oscars hopefuls.
What about the rest of this year’s nominees? Did they all register fresh .com domains for their movies?
No. In fact, only 10 of the 52 movies appear to have registered new .com domains for their official sites — one more than .movie — including two of the Best Picture nominations.
These fresh .com regs include domains such as parasite-movie.com, richardjewellmovie.com, ilostmybodymovie.com, forsamafilm.com and breakthroughmovie.com.
One movie — Honeyland, a North Macedonian environmentalist documentary about bees — uses a .earth domain.
I discovered today that, rather brilliantly, the Japan-based .earth registry demands registrants “voluntarily pledge to become ambassadors for Earth and do away with actions that harm Earth and its inhabitants” in its Ts&Cs.
So, of the 52 nominated movies, only 20 opted to register a new domain for their official site — down from 24 in 2010 — and that business was split evenly between .com and new gTLDs.
Whether the movies opted for a .movie domain appears to depend in large part on the distributor.
Sony appears to be a bit of a fan of the gTLD, while Fox, Disney and Warner tend to use after-the-slash branding on their existing .com domains for their films’ official sites.
I tallied 17 movies that have their official sites on their distributor’s .com/.org domain.
There are also trends that I could not have predicted a decade ago, such as the rise of streaming services. Back in 2010, Netflix was still largely a DVD-delivery player and was not yet creating original content.
But this year, seven of the Oscar-nominated movies were made and/or distributed by Netflix, and as such the official web site is the same place you go to actually watch the film — netflix.com.
A few of the nominated animated shorts don’t need official sites either — you just head to YouTube to watch them for free.
There are currently only about 3,200 domains in the .movie zone file, about 1,200 fewer than rival .film. It renews at over $300 a year at retail, so it’s not cheaper than the alternatives by a long way.

Donuts slashes prices on a million domains

Donuts is to overhaul the pricing on 1.1 million registry-reserved “premium” domain names, taking hundreds of thousands out of premium status altogether.
The company said today that it has decided to reduce the registration cost of 250,000 domains across its 242 new gTLDs. Discounts as deep as 90% are possible, judging by the company’s pricing page.
A further 850,000 will have their premium tag removed and return to regular pricing.
Part of the overhaul relates to the Rightside acquisition, which closed in 2017. While Rightside’s portfolio of TLDs was substantially smaller than Donuts’, it had been much more aggressive on its premium pricing.
For the domains being moved to standard pricing, Donuts will give it one last shot at squeezing a premium price out of them, however.
The company said that from September 5 to November 1 there will be a “pre-sales” event, during which registrants can pay the current premium fee for the first year on the understanding that they will renew at the standard pricing.
For example, drunk.games currently commands a roughly $130-a-year registration fee at registrars. If you buy it during the pre-sales event you’ll pay $130 for the first year but only about $20 upon renewal.
Donuts says this unusual landrush-style event is designed to make the names more attractive to investors who want to get in before prices fall.
The full effect of the price changes takes effect November 5.
It’s worth noting that standard pricing at Donuts is actually going up across most TLDs, by as much as 9%, on October 1, so you may want to check what your actual renewal fee is before buying.
A searchable database of the newly priced inventory can be found here.

Looks like .fans has a new Chinese owner

It appears that the struggling new gTLD .fans has changed ownership for the second time in a year.
According to ICANN’s web site, the .fans Registry Agreement was assigned to a company called ZDNS International on June 28.
Since August 2018, the contract had been in the hands of a CentralNic subsidiary called Fans TLD, having been originally operated by Asiamix Digital.
ZDNS International appears to be a newish Hong Kong subsidiary of major China-based DNS service provider ZDNS.
ZDNS provides DNS services for more than 20 TLDs, mostly Chinese-language, but as far as I can tell it is not the contracted party for any.
It’s also known for providing registry gateway services for non-Chinese registries that want to set up shop in the country.
CentralNic took over .fans last year after Asiamix failed to get the TLD’s sales to take off.
.fans had about 1,700 domains under management at the time, and it’s been pretty much flat ever since. I don’t think CentralNic has been promoting it.
Over the same period, singular competitor .fan, which Donuts acquired from Asiamix last year, has gone from 0 to almost 3,000 registrations.
If CentralNic, a public company, made a profit on the flip it does not appear to have been material enough to require disclosure to shareholders.

Cloudflare “bug” reveals hundreds of secret domain prices

The secret wholesale prices for hundreds of TLDs have been leaked, due to an alleged “bug” at a registrar.
The registry fees for some 259 TLDs, including those managed by Donuts, Verisign and Afilias, are currently publicly available online, after a programmer used what they called a “bug” in Cloudflare’s API to scrape together price lists without actually buying anything.
Cloudflare famously busted into the domain registrar market last September by announcing that it would sell domains at cost, thumbing its nose at other registrars by suggesting that all they’re doing is “pinging an API”.
But because most TLD registries have confidentiality clauses in their Registry-Registrar Agreements, accredited registrars are not actually allowed to reveal the wholesale prices.
That’s kind of a problem if you’re a registrar that has announced that you will never charge a markup, ever.
Cloudflare has tried to get around this by not listing its prices publicly.
Currently, it does not sell new registrations, instead only accepting inbound transfers from other registrars. Registry transaction reports reveal that it has had tens of thousands of names transferred in, but has not created a significant number of new domains.
(As an aside, it’s difficult to see how it could ever sell a new reg without first revealing its price and therefore breaking its NDAs.).
It appears that the only way to manually ascertain the wholesale prices of all of the TLDs it supports would be to buy one of each at a different registrar, then transfer them to Cloudflare, thereby revealing the “at cost” price.
This would cost over $9,500, at Cloudflare’s prices, and it’s difficult to see what the ROI would be.
However, one enterprising individual discovered via the Cloudflare API that the registrar was not actually checking whether they owned a domain before revealing its price.
They were therefore able to compile a list of Cloudflare’s prices and therefore the wholesale prices registries charge.
The list, and the script used to compile it, are both currently available on code repository Github.
The bulk of the list comprises Donuts’ vast portfolio, but most TLDs belonging to Afilias (including the ccTLD .io), XYZ.com and Radix are also on there.
It’s not possible for me to verify that all of the prices are correct, but the ones that are comparable to already public information (such as .com and .net) match, and the rest are all in the ballpark of what I’ve always assumed or have been privately told they were.
The data was last refreshed in April, so without updates its shelf life is likely limited. Donuts, for example, is introducing price increases across most of its portfolio this year.

After $30 million deal, is a .voice gTLD now inevitable?

Do big second-level domain sales translate into new gTLD success, and does the record-breaking $30 million sale of voice.com this week make a .voice gTLD inevitable?
The answers, I believe, are no and maybe.
Before the 2012 new gTLD application round, one way applicants picked their strings was by combing through the .com zone file to find frequently-occurring words that terminated the second level string.
This is where we get the likes of .site and .online from Radix and much of Donuts’ portfolio.
But applicants also looked at lists of high-priced secondary market sales for inspiration.
This is where we get the likes of .vodka, from MMX.
The latter strategy has seen mixed-to-poor results.
Five of the top domain sales, as compiled by Domain Name Journal, were not eligible for gTLD status are they are too short.
Of the remaining 15 strings, “sex” (which occurs twice), “fund”, “porn”, “toys” and “vodka” were all applied for in 2012 and are currently on sale.
The strings “clothes” and “diamond” do not appear as gTLDs, but Donuts runs both .clothing and .diamonds.
Not delegated in any fashion are “porno” (unless you count it as a derivative of “porn”), “slots”, “tesla”, “whisky” and “california”. A company called IntercontinentalExchange runs .ice as a dot-brand.
As well as .clothing and .diamonds, .fund and .toys are both also Donuts TLDs. None of them are doing spectacularly well.
At the lower end, .diamonds currently has fewer than 3,000 domain under management, but has a relatively high price compared to the the higher-volume TLDs in Donuts’ stable.
At the high-volume end, .fund has just shy of 16,000 names and .clothing has about 12,000.
Judging by their retail prices, and the fact that Donuts benefits from the economies of scale of a 240-strong TLD portfolio, I’m going to guess these domains are profitable, but not hugely so.
If we turn our attention to .vodka, with its roughly 1,500 domains, it seems clear that MMX is barely covering the cost of its annual ICANN fees. Yet vodka.com sold for $3 million.
So will anyone be tempted to apply for .voice in the next gTLD application round? I’d say it’s very possible.
First, “voice” is a nice enough string. It could apply to telephony services, but also to general publishing platforms that give their customers a “voice”. I’d say it could gather up enough registrations to fit profitably into a large portfolio, but would not break any records in terms of volume.
But perhaps the existence of voice.com buyer Block.one as a possible applicant will raise some other applicants out of the woodwork.
Block.one, which uses a new gTLD and an alt-ccTLD (.io) for its primary web sites, is certainly not out-of-touch when it come to alternative domain names.
Could it apply for .voice, and if it does how much would it be willing to spend to pay off rival applicants? It still apparently has billions of dollars from its internet coin offering in the bank.
How much of that would it be prepared to pay for .voice at private auction?
That prospect alone might be enough to stir the interest of some would-be applicants, but it has to be said that it’s by no means certain that the highly gameable application process ICANN deployed in 2012 is going to look the same next time around.