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.
CentralNic buys .fans for peanuts
CentralNic has acquired the flailing new gTLD .fans for an undisclosed sum.
The value of the deal was low enough that publicly traded CentralNic was not obliged to disclose the purchase to the market, CEO Ben Crawford confirmed.
The ICANN contract seems to have changed hands — transferred to a CentralNic subsidiary call Fans TLD Ltd — back in August.
We revealed back in May that CentralNic was acting as a caretaker for .fans, and sister TLD .fan, after original registry Asiamix Digital failed to make enough money to keep the business going.
.fan, which Asiamix bought from Donuts but never launched, was sold back to Donuts in June.
Donuts took .fan to sunrise last week and plans to take it to general availability in December.
.fans domains, meanwhile, have been in registrar storefronts since 2015, but the current tally of registered domains is barely above 1,600.
Domains are still selling for around the $100 mark, roughly double the expected retail price of .fan.
Donuts buys back .fan, ignores plural .fans
Donuts has purchased the unlaunched new gTLD .fan from its struggling owner, just three years after selling it.
The company said today that .fan will become its 241st TLD in its portfolio, having inked a deal with Asiamix Digital.
Asiamix also runs the plural .fans, which Donuts has not acquired.
A Donuts spokesperson said the singular variant was the only acquisition considered, but did not say why.
The gTLD has a colorful ownership history, given that it has not even launched yet.
It was originally owned by Donuts, which won it unopposed in the 2012 application round.
The company then transferred it to then-independent Rightside under a deal the two companies had covering about 100 applications.
Rightside then in 2015 briskly sold the contract to Asiamix, which already had the rights to the plural .fans and presumably wanted to reduce market confusion.
For whatever reason, Asiamix sat on .fan and never even announced launch plans.
Rightside was then acquired by Donuts last year.
Donuts’ spokesperson declined to disclose whether the latest re-acquisition was for the same, more, or less than the original 2015 transaction.
Asiamix is currently very likely facing the death of its business, having failed to make a go of .fans.
The plural has never had more than about 1,500 names in its zone file.
Donuts plans to launch .fan in short order, with general availability expected in mid-September. We should be looking at a sunrise period fairly soon.
Failure to launch: 10 years-old gTLDs that are still dormant
Over six years after the last new gTLD application window closed, more than one in 10 new gTLDs have yet to launch, even though some have been delegated for over four years.
Once you filter out duplicates, withdrawals and terminations from the original 1,930 applications, there were a maximum of roughly 1,300 potential new gTLDs from the 2012 round.
But, by my calculations, 144 of those have yet to even get around to their sunrise period. Most of those haven’t even filed their launch plans with ICANN yet.
Here’s 10 from that list I’ve picked based on how interesting they appear to me, in no particular order.
Yes, DI is doing listicles now. Hate-mail to the usual address.
.forum
This one’s owned by Jay Westerdal’s Top Level Spectrum, the same company behind .feedback, .realty and others. I quite like the potential of this string — the internet is chock-full of forums due to the easy availability of open-source forum software — but so far nobody’s gotten to register one. It was delegated back in June 2015 and doesn’t have a published launch plan as yet. An FAQ reading just saying “Jay was here !!!!! Test deploy..delete me later…” has been up on its site since at least last September. TLS is also sitting on .contact and .pid (for “personal ID”) with no launch dates in sight.
.scholarships
Owned by Scholarships.com, there’s a whiff of the defensive about this one. It’s been in the root since March 2015 but its site states the registry “is still finishing launch plans and will provide updates as they become available”. Scholarships.com is a site that connects would-be higher education students to potential sources of funding. It’s difficult to imagine many ways the matching gTLD could possibly help in that mission.
.giving
JustGiving, the UK-based charity campaign aggregator, won this gTLD and had it delegated in August 2015, but seemingly still hasn’t figured out what it wants to do with it. It’s not a dot-brand, so it’s presumably mulling over ways to give .giving domains to fundraisers in a way that does not compromise credibility. Whatever its plans, it’s taking its sweet time over them.
.cancerresearch
This is a weird one. Delegated four years ago, the Australian Cancer Research Foundation rather quickly went live with a bunch of interlinked .cancerresearch web sites, using its contractually permitted allotment of promotional domains. Contractually, it’s not a dot-brand, but it’s basically acting like one, having never actually given ICANN any info about sunrise, eligibility, trademark claims, general availability, etc. Technically, it’s still pre-launch, and I can’t see any reason why it would want to budge from that status. Huge loophole in the ICANN rules?
.beauty
Another whiff of gaming here. International woman-shaming powerhouse L’Oreal still has no announced plans to launch .beauty, .skin or .hair, which it had originally wanted to run as so-called “closed generics” (presumably to keep the keywords out of the hands of competitors). Of its small portfolio of generic gTLDs, delegated in 2016, it has actually launched .makeup already, with a $6,000 retail price and a strategy seemingly based on registry-owned domains matching the names of makeup-focused social media influencers. At least it’s actually selling names, even if nobody’s bought one yet.
.budapest
One of three city TLDs that were delegated back in 2014 but have yet to start selling domains. MMX is to run it in partnership with the local government of the Hungarian city, if it ever gets off the ground. Madrid (.madrid) and Zurich (.zuerich) have both also yet to roll out, although Zurich has settled on early 2019 for its launch.
.fan
Regular DI readers won’t be surprised to see this one on the list. In what may turn out to be a shocking waste of money, .fans registry Asiamix Digital acquired the singular .fan from Donuts back in 2015 and promptly let it sit idle for the next three years. Currently, with .fans turning out to be a flop, Asiamix has money troubles and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it under new ownership before too long. It’s not a terrible string, so there’s some potential there.
.ком, etc
.ком is one of 11 internationalized domain name transliterations of .com — .कॉम, .ком, .点看, .คอม, .नेट, .닷컴, .大拿, .닷넷, .コム, .كوم and .קוֹם — that Verisign had delegated back in 2015. To date, only the Japanese .コム has launched, and the registry reportedly arsed it up quite badly. Records show .コム peaked at over 28,000 names and sits at fewer than 7,000 today. None of the remaining IDNs have launch dates attached.
Anything owned by Google or Amazon
When it comes to sitting on dormant gTLDs, you can’t top Google and Amazon for sheer numbers. Google has 19 strings in pre-launch states right now, while Amazon has a whopping 34. Amazon is letting the likes of .free, .wow, .now, .deal, .save and .secure sit idle, while Google is still stroking its chin on the likes of .eat, .meme, .fly and .channel. At the snail’s pace these companies roll out gTLDs, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these strings never hit the market.
.bom
Portuguese for “.good”, .bom was delegated to local ccTLD registry Nic.br in 2015 but has no published launch dates and no content on its nic.bom registry web site. I’d say more, but I expect a certain prolific DI commenter could do a better job of it, so I’ll turn it over to him…
CentralNic now managing failing .fan and .fans
CentralNic appears to be acting as a caretaker for the failing new gTLDs .fan and .fans.
IANA records show that a company lawyer took over as administrative contact for the pair late last week.
Asiamix Digital, the original registry, is still listed as the sponsor for both, and its ICANN registry agreement does not appear to have been reassigned.
It does not appear to be an acquisition. I hear Asiamix is basically using CentralNic’s TLD management service, as it struggles to remain alive.
CentralNic already acts as the back-end registry for both TLDs.
ICANN hit Asiamix with a breach notice for tens of thousands of dollars of unpaid fees a month ago, terminating its affiliated registrar for the same reasons around the same time.
The registry had attempted to auction off the strings a couple of years ago, unsuccessfully.
While technically based in Hong Kong, ICANN has been sending Asiamix’s compliance notices to an address in Milan, Italy.
All of Asiamix’s official web sites still appear to be non-functional. I bought the .net address listed in its IANA records to make a silly point a month ago and the equivalent .com has since expired too.
.fans has about 1,400 names in its zone file right now, while .fan never actually launched.
I just bought a new gTLD registry’s domain for $10
Are .fan and .fans the latest new gTLDs to go out of business? It certainly looks that way.
ICANN has hit the registry with a breach notice for unpaid dues and stripped it of its registrar accreditation.
In addition, its web sites no longer appear functional and I’ve just bought its official IANA-listed domain name for under $10.
Asiamix Digital is the Hong Kong-based company behind both TLDs, doing business as dotFans.
It launched .fans in September 2015, with retail pricing up around the $100 mark, but never actually got around to launching the singular variant, which it acquired (defensively?) from Rightside (now Donuts) earlier that year.
.fans had fewer than 1,400 domains in its zone file yesterday, down from a peak of around 1,500, while .fan had none.
dotFans in-house accredited registrar, Fan Domains, didn’t seem to actually sell any domains and it got terminated by ICANN (pdf) at the end of March for failing to provide basic registrar services.
And now it seems the registry itself has been labeled as a deadbeat by ICANN Compliance, which has filed a breach notice (pdf) alleging non-payment of registry fees.
While breach notices against TLD registries are not uncommon these days, I think this is the first one I’ve seen alleging non-payment and nothing else.
The notice claims that the registry’s legal contact’s email address is non-functional.
In addition, the domains nic.fans, nic.fan and dotfans.com all currently resolve to dead placeholder pages.
Meanwhile, dotfans.net, the company’s official domain name as listed in the IANA database now belongs to me, kinda.
It expired March 12, after which it was promptly placed into a GoDaddy expired domains auction. Where I just bought it for £6.98 ($9.92).
To be clear, I do not currently control the domain. It’s still in post-expiration limbo and GoDaddy support tells me the original owner still has eight days left to reclaim it.
After that point, maybe I’ll start getting the registry’s hate mail from ICANN. Or perhaps not; it seems to have been using the .com equivalent for its formal communications.
Should .fan and .fans get acquired by another registry soon — which certainly seems possible — rest assured I’ll let the domain go for a modest sum.
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