Carlsberg snaps up 150 .beer domains, including the most British domain I’ve ever seen

Brewing giant Carlsberg has joined Minds + Machines’ pioneer program for the .beer gTLD, buying 150 brand and generic .beer domains.
M+M said today that football.beer, which is arguably a more British domain than gov.uk, is among Carlsberg’s new portfolio.
The registry said in a press release: “football.beer will help support the company’s far-reaching commitment to the football. Carlsberg is a leading sponsor of UEFA EURO 2016, the Barclays Premier League, and Liverpool Football Club.”
The brewer will also use quality.beer in its marketing.
Trademarks baltika.beer, tuborg.beer, holsten.beer and kronenbourg.beer have also been acquired.
Carlsberg is the fifth-largest brewer in the world and fourth-largest in the UK, with annual global revenue of $9.5 billion.
The .beer gTLD could use the publicity. It has been in general availability since September last year. Today, it has fewer than 7,800 names in its zone file.

M+M sells net.work for $100,000

Minds + Machines has made its first six-figure new gTLD domain sale.
The domain net.work was sold in a private deal to business consultancy BearingPoint for $100,000, the company said today.
It added that a “significant annual renewal fee” applies.
It’s one of 430 premium domains to have been sold in .work, M+M said, since it went to general availability in February.
The gTLD had just shy of 55,000 domains in its zone file yesterday, recent growth partly attributable to a deep discounting program.
M+M’s registrar currently sells .work domains for less than $2.

Krueger removed as chair as M+M finally starts seeing some revenue

Minds + Machines co-founder Fred Krueger has been kicked out of his job as executive chairman of the company.
The news came as the new gTLD registry reported its first full year of results as a proper, revenue-generating company.
The company reported revenue of $1.9 million for 2014, compared to $56,000 in 2013.
Its report includes a “cash revenue” line of $5 million, to show off revenues that it has deferred to future periods due to standard domain industry accounting.
For accounting purposes, M+M was profitable to the tune of $22 million for the year, but almost none of that is from actually selling domains — $33.7 million of profit came from losing new gTLD auctions.
That’s not a sustainable or predictable part of the business — nobody knows exactly when or if ICANN will launch the next round of new gTLDs — but it did help M+M grow its cash pile to $45.7 million.
That pile may grow or shrink depending on how aggressive the company is in its 11 remaining new gTLD contention set auctions.
CEO Antony Van Couvering said that M+M is also eyeing acquisition opportunities as the new gTLD industry enters an early consolidation phase.
He said that M+M’s early priorities include a focus on selling premium domains that have higher than usual annual renewal fees.
At the same time as announcing its results, the company said Krueger, who founded M+M with Van Couvering in 2009 in anticipation of the new gTLD program, has quit.
While he’s technically resigned, he left no doubt in his unusually frank resignation letter that he’s actually been forced out by the M+M board of directors.
He wrote that the decision was “initiated by the board” and that his “decision” to leave “was unexpected – for me at least”.
He added that he was “OK with it, indeed supportive of it” and that he has no intention to sell off his substantial stake in the company.
Krueger will now focus on Mozart, a web site building software maker that he’s been leading for the last couple of years. M+M has a deal to offer Mozart to its registrants.
He’s been replaced, albeit in a non-executive capacity, by Keith Teare, an existing director.
Teare is a tech veteran perhaps best known in the domain industry for launching and running RealNames, which attempted to replicate AOL Keywords for the Internet Explorer browser at the turn of the century.

.london clear winner as M+M releases raw reg data

.london accounts for over 37% of sales in Minds + Machines’ portfolio of live gTLDs, according to company data released this morning.
M+M published registration figures for its 19 generally available TLDs as part of a trading update ahead of its full-year financials.
The data shows that four of its top five strings are geographic in nature.
[table id=32 /]
The TLDs have launch dates ranging from April 2014 to April 2015.
It should be noted that .kiwi and .gop are run by M+M clients, with M+M providing the back-end only.
There’s a delta of up to 5% between these reg numbers and the numbers of domains appearing in the zone files of some of these gTLDs.
For example, we count 59,162 domains in .london’s zone file and 27,955 in .bayern today, suggesting that on any given day a couple thousand domains are not configured in the DNS.
In other TLDs, such as .kiwi and .work, the zone file numbers and the reg numbers have almost no difference at all.
The company also disclosed that in its registrar business “Premium Names”, which command a higher fee, account for 3% of its registrations and 25% of revenue.
M+M recently headhunted Trent Tucker from Rightside to manage premium name sales.

FIBA wins .basketball

A sport-related new gTLD is going to an official sporting body.
FIBA, the Fédération Internationale de Basketball, won the right to .basketball after an auction shoot-out with Donuts and Famous Four Media.
While FIBA is the official world organizing body for the sport, there’s no plan to place strict restrictions on the gTLD — the application states that .basketball will be open to all.
FIBA had filed Community Objections to its two rival bids, arguing that they would allow gambling web sites that would harm the reputation of the sport, but the objection panels rejected both complaints in January this year.
FIBA’s bid is supported by Minds + Machines, its registry back-end provider.

Brewers Association backs .beer

Continuing its strategy of getting well-known anchor tenants involved in its new gTLD launches, Minds + Machines has recruited the Brewers Association to back its just-launched .beer.
The BA represents over 2,300 independent breweries in the US, according to its web site.
.beer hit general availability yesterday. Due to delays with ICANN’s zone file publishing system this morning I can’t yet bring you the first-day figures for the TLD.
The launch was timed to coincide with the Great American Beer Festival in Denver, Colorado.
Two weeks ago, M+M launched .country with backing from music legend Dolly Parton, who claimed dolly.country, dollyparton.country, queenof.country, dollywood.country and 9to5.country.
If nothing else, the endorsement reminded non-Americans that .country is supposed to relate to music, not geography.

M+M turns profit on the back of gTLD auctions

Minds + Machines posted an operating profit of almost £3 million ($4.9 million) for the first half of the year, almost entirely driven by the proceeds of losing new gTLD auctions.
The registry record a profit to June 30 of £2.9 million on revenue of $68,000.
The “profit on gTLD auctions” line item that permitted that seemingly impossible profit number was £7.1 million ($11.6 million), based on M+M losing eight out of 12 private auctions.
The company had £22 million ($36 million) in cash and other current assets on its balance sheet at the end of the period.
None of M+M’s big TLDs had launched in the first half, hence the low revenue. Since the half ended, .london has proven successful and several more new gTLDs wholly or partially owned by M+M have also launched.
In his statement to the market, chair Fred Krueger said:

A key variable in our financial position is the dynamic of private auctions, which we have embraced, and which has worked tremendously to our advantage. We believe that our current still contested strings represent significant assets which we have the potential to monetize either to further our existing new TLDs or to purchase additional new TLDs at auction.

He also reiterated CEO Antony Van Couvering’s call for a new metric to track gTLD registry health that is based on revenue-per-domain rather than simple volumes.
His outlook for new gTLDs was arguably less cautious than his counterpart at CentralNic, which reported its half-year numbers yesterday and talked of demand “falling short of industry expectations”.
Krueger said:

Name registration data available to-date indicates a strong opening for a variety of new products/domains, and also shows that we are still very early in the adoption curve for new TLDs. We expect that the growth of almost all new TLDs will likely follow an “S curve”, as it historically has for newly launched TLDs, rather than a straight line.

He also reconfirmed that M+M plans to aggressively pursue its new integrated registrar business as a means to drive growth in its gTLDs, rather than simply relying on the channel.

.vegas beats all six new M+M gTLDs combined

Minds + Machines’ first day of general availability for its first six wholly owned new gTLDs has produced some very disappointing numbers.
The company managed to net just 1,694 new domains across .country, .cooking, .vodka, .rodeo, .horse and .fishing combined yesterday, according to this morning’s zone files.
It has fewer than 2,000 names across all six zones.
Meanwhile, .vegas, which also went to GA yesterday, managed to net 2,933 new domains, ending the day at 3,903.
Here’s a table of M+M’s performance over its first seven or eight hours of GA, which began at 1600 UTC yesterday.
[table id=31 /]
Assuming the zone files are fresh, it’s a poor first day for the company whichever way you look at it, especially given that M+M has been accepting pre-registrations in its TLDs since November 2013.
As well as being vertically integrated, M+M has about 80 third-party registrars on board to sell its names, including the largest.
Afilias’ .organic, which also went to GA yesterday, shows just one new registration today.
However, this can be attributed to the fact that registrants need to submit credentials for manual verification before their new domains are allowed to go live in the zone file.

Yeehaw! Bumper crop of new gTLD launches

There’s a definite wild west flavor to today’s crop of new gTLD launches, in a week which sees no fewer than 16 strings hit general availability.
Kicking off the week, today Minds + Machines brings its first wholly-owned TLDs to market.
Following the successful launch of .london, for which M+M acts as the back-end, last week, today we see the launch of the less exciting .cooking, .country, .fishing, .horse, .rodeo, and .vodka.
Afilias’ rural-themed .organic also goes to GA today.
As does .vegas, an oddity in the geo-gTLD space as it’s a city pretty much synonymous with one vertical market, gambling. Or three vertical markets, if you include booze and prostitution.
.vegas names do not require a local presence, so I’m expecting to see gambling businesses the world over attempt to capitalize on the Vegas brand regardless of their location.
A second batch of launches is due on Wednesday September 17.
Sticking with the wild west theme, RightSide’s .republican is due to go first-come, first-served.
With a somewhat more eastern flavor, Radix Registry’s first new gTLDs — .website, .press and .host — all hit GA on the same day.
Donuts’ .loans, .life, .guide and .church all enter their standard-pricing phases, while .place and .direct enter their premium-priced Early Access Period on Wednesday too.

.london launch day biggest yet for new gTLDs, but did it miss targets?

Dot London Domains’ .london had just shy of 35,000 domains in its zone file this morning, after its first partial day of general availability.
That’s an addition of 12,421 domains over yesterday’s number, making .london the 11th most-registered new gTLD.
This makes .london — which in my opinion has had one of the best launch marketing campaigns we’ve seen this year — the most-successful gTLD, in volume terms, after its first GA day.
It has beaten the 33,012 names that .在线 (“.online” in Chinese) and the 31,645 names that .berlin had in their zone files at the end of their respective GA days.
.london domains are not particularly cheap, either. Minds + Machines sells at £30 ($48) a year and Go Daddy (which lists .london at the top of its UK home page today) sells at $59.99.
UK-based Domainmonster, part of Host Europe Group, performed well with a £34.99 ($56) annual fee.
There were 22,547 .london names claimed during the “London Priority Period”, a combined sunrise/landrush phase that gave first dibs on names to trademark owners followed by London residents.
The registry has not broken down the mix between sunrise and landrush, but I believe based on the paltry sunrise performance of every other new gTLD to date that the vast majority were landrush names.
The full priority period queue has not yet been processed — domains with more than one applicant are currently in auction.
Back-end provider Minds + Machines, recently told the markets that it expects about a quarter of landrush/sunrise names to go to auction, so we could be looking at something like 7,500 applications (as opposed to domains) currently in the auction queue.
What this may mean is that .london had roughly 30,000 applications during its priority period, about 20,000 less than it had predicted back in July.
Dot London Domains is closely affiliated with London & Partners, the PR machine for the Mayor of London, so it had resources and access to throw at an effective marketing campaign.