XYZ launches its beauty-themed gTLDs with slashed prices
XYZ.com is readying the launch of its four recently acquired beauty-themed gTLDs, along with one other.
.skin, .hair .makeup and .beauty entered their sunrise periods today, where they will stay until February 10.
All four were acquired from L’Oreal earlier this year, but .makeup was the only one that had launched and gone through its mandatory sunrise.
Despite this, XYZ is putting .makeup through what it calls a “trademark owner landrush”, where domains will cost IP owners about a grand.
That’s actually a lot cheaper than the price L’Oreal had the domains at during general availability — deterrent pricing of around $5,500 wholesale per year.
It looks like all four domains in this mini-portfolio will be priced around the $20 mark at registrars during general availability, which is due to begin March 2.
There’s also going to be an Early Access Period for seven days from February 10.
All of the above also applies to .quest, which XYZ acquired from a Hong Kong multilevel marketing firm a year ago. XYZ is marketing it as a TLD for “gurus, knowledgeable experts, and authorities in any field”.
XYZ expands gTLD stable as L’Oreal exits the domain game
XYZ.com has acquired four new gTLDs from the cosmetics company L’Oreal.
The portfolio registry expanded its stable with the additions of .makeup, .beauty, .hair and .skin, all of which had their contracts change hands last month, ICANN records show.
XYZ seems to have told Domain Name Wire last week that it plans to relaunch its new acquisitions this year alongside another recent purchase, .quest (sorry for the delay, Andrew, I’ve been sick).
For L’Oreal, the deal marks the end of its lofty ambitions in the new gTLD space. The company applied for 14 strings back in 2012, a mixture of generic dictionary words and brands.
Now, none remain.
A bunch of its dot-brand applications were dumped prior to contract signing. The others were turned off, unused, after L’Oreal asked ICANN to terminate its contracts.
The four non-branded strings XYZ picked up were originally intended as “closed generics” — an attempt to close competitors out of the market for industry-relevant keywords — but that was scuppered when ICANN decided to ban the concept.
L’Oreal attempted to worm its way around the ban by pricing domains at $5,500 wholesale and imposing extremely restrictive registration policies. This was pretty effective at warding off unwanted sales.
But the company did actually attempt something fairly innovative with .makeup, as I documented in 2017, registering the names of a couple hundred beauty-obsessed social media influencers in an attempt to create a registry-owned social media portal focused on pushing L’Oreal products.
The hub site, at welove.makeup, now bounces web visitors to makeup.com.
To the best of my knowledge, L’Oreal didn’t do anything with its other generics.
Still, L’Oreal’s loss is XYZ’s gain. All four are fairly strong strings that could find a market, in my view.
XYZ now has 13 gTLDs under direct contract (12 of which were acquired post-2012) and partial stakes, with Uniregistry, in three others.
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