Donuts extends DPML Plus and delays price hike
Donuts has delayed the price increases coming to its trademark-blocking service and extended availability of the “plus” version for three more months.
Domain Protected Marks List Plus, which lets companies block brands and variations such as typos and brand+keywords across Donuts stable of 200ish TLDs, will now be available until March 31.
The price hike for vanilla DPML, which does not include the variant-blocking, has also been delayed until the end of January, the registry said.
Both deadlines were previously December 31.
DPML Plus, which grants 10-year blocks on one trademark and three variants in every Donuts TLD, has a recommended retail price of $9,999.
Fully exploited, that amounted at the September launch to $1.26 per blocked domain per year, but Donuts’ portfolio has grown since then.
Retail prices for the plain DPML are reportedly going up from $2,500 per string to $4,400 for a five-year block at one registrar when the price rise kicks in. That’s a 76% increase.
For $10,000, Donuts will block hundreds of typos and premiums for your brand
Donuts has announced an expansion of its domain-blocking service that will enable brand owners to cheaply (kinda) block misspellings of their trademarks.
Brand owners whose trademarks match “premium” generic strings will also be able to take matching domains out of circulation using the registry’s new DPML Plus service.
DPML, for Domain Protected Marks List, is Donuts’ way of giving trademark owners a way to bulk-block their marks across Donuts’ entire stable of gTLDs, which currently stands at 197 strings.
With typical sunrise period prices at $200+, registering a single string across almost 200 gTLDs during sunrise could near a $40,000 outlay. In general availability, it would often be about a tenth of that price.
But the original DPML, with a roughly $3,000 retail price for a five-year block, reduced the cost to protect a single string to about $3 per domain per year.
Now, with DPML Plus, Donuts is offering a premium service that adds the ability to block typos and premium names.
Typos and substring-based blocking were near the top of the intellectual property community’s wish-list when the new gTLD program was being developed, but those features were never incorporated into ICANN rights protection mechanisms.
But for $9,999 (suggested retail price), DPML Plus buyers get a 10-year block on the string that matches their trademark and three extra strings that are either typos of the trademark or contain the trademark as a substring, Donuts said.
So Google would for example be able to block android.examples, anrdoid.examples, androidphone.examples and googleandroidphone.examples using a single DPML Plus subscription.
Basically, they get to block up to 788 domains at $9,999 over 10 years, which works out to about $1.26 per domain per year.
It looks nice and cheap on that basis, but companies wishing to block dozens of base trademarks would be looking at six or seven-figure up-front payments.
DPML Plus also lifts the ban on blocking “premium” domains.
Under the old DPML, customers could not block a domain if Donuts had flagged it with a premium price, but under DPML Plus they can.
This opens the door to brand owners who have valuable trademarks on generic dictionary words to get them blocked across the whole Donuts portfolio.
A Donuts spokesperson said the company reserves the right to reject such strings if it suspects gaming.
Another benefit of the DPML Plus is the ability to prevent other companies with identical trademarks later unblocking and snatching blocked domains for themselves.
Currently, third parties with matching brands can “override” DPML blocks, but that feature is turned off for DPML Plus subscribers. They get exclusivity for the life of the block.
Donuts said the Plus offer will only be available to buy between October 1 and December 31.
As an added carrot, from January 1 the price of its vanilla DPML service is going to go up by an amount the company currently does not want to disclose.
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