.xyz tops 5 million domains as penny deals continue

XYZ.com became the first new gTLD operator to top five million domains in a single TLD last night, when .xyz added almost 1.5 million names.
According to our parse of today’s zone file, .xyz has 5,096,589 names, up 1,451,763 on yesterday’s 3,644,826.
On Monday, the number was just under 2.8 million.
The massive spike came after what was supposed to be the final day of a three-day discounting blitz, as registrars sold the names for $0.02, $0.01 or even nothing.
Uniregistry, which sold for a penny, seems to have claimed the lion’s share of the regs.
The company supplied DI with data showing it had processed over 1.16 million registrations on June 2, about 90% of which CEO Frank Schilling said were .xyz sales.
At its peak, Uniregistry created 95,793 new domains in an hour, this data shows.
Judging by the numbers published on its home page, the registrar has pretty much doubled its domains under management overnight.
The rapid growth of .xyz is very probably not over.
Some registrars said they will carry on with the penny giveaways for an extra day.
At least one popular registrar, NameCheap, told irritated customers that the popularity of its $0.02 offer meant it had a backlog of registration requests that would take 12 to 24 hours to process. Those may not have showed up in the zone file yet.
In addition, .xyz prices are expected to be dirt cheap — just $0.18 at Uniregistry, for example — for the rest of the month, at least at the 50-odd registrars XYZ says are participating in its promotion.

Registrars selling .xyz names for pennies

XYZ.com’s campaign to keep its volumes high as .xyz approaches its second anniversary seem to have resulted in basically free registrations.
Uniregistry said yesterday that it has started selling .xyz domains for just $0.01, and NameCheap is offering them for $0.02.
The prices, which apply to first-year registrations, kicked in yesterday and expire at midnight June 3.
Over in China, Xin Net and West.cn are both pricing the domains at a relatively huge CNY 2 ($0.30).
I expect there are similar offers at other registrars too.
West.cn. the largest .xyz registrar, said last week that it is also subsidizing renewals for the month of June, bringing the cost down to $2.73.
The aforementioned registrars have big splashes announcing the offers on their home pages.
XYZ said Friday that it has put aside “several million dollars” to advertise its birthday on registrar storefronts and elsewhere.
Uniregistry said that from June 3 to June 30 the price will be just $0.18.
Uniregistry’s current .xyz volume is measured in the tens of thousands. It’s ranked just behind Go Daddy, which does not appear to be participating in this promotion, by .xyz domains under management.
.xyz went into general availability June 2, 2014.
Since August 2015, not long after its anniversary deletes have been substantially outstripping renewals, but adds have been going nuts.
It has about 2.8 million domains in its zone file right now, two million of which have been added in the last 12 months.
Despite the anniversary hoopla this time around, there was not a big spike in .xyz registrations around its first birthday last year, when it added a fairly normal 50,000 or so domains.

Go Daddy advertising privacy petition on Facebook

Go Daddy appears to be putting its money where its mouth is when it comes to arguments about domain privacy.
The company is paying for “sponsored” posts on Facebook that promote the ongoing petition against proposed changes to Whois policy at ICANN.
This has been appearing on Facebook for me all day, seriously interrupting my Farmville time:

Clicking the ad takes you directly to the Save Domain Privacy petition, rather than a Go Daddy sales pitch.
As I reported last week, thousands of internet users have blasted ICANN with template comments complaining about proposed limits on Whois privacy.
There are currently over 10,000 such comments, I estimate, with over a week left until the filing deadline.
Registrars, Go Daddy among them, are largely concerned about a minority proposal emerging from in a proxy/privacy service accreditation working group that would ban transactional e-commerce sites from having private registrations.
They’re also bothered that intellectual property owners could get more rights to unmask privacy users under the proposals.
Despite Go Daddy’s outreach, Repect Our Privacy, letter-writing campaign, backed by NameCheap and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, seems to be responsible for most of the comments filed to date.
Not that it’s necessarily relevant today, but NameCheap and Go Daddy were on opposing sides of the Stop Online Piracy Act debate — a linked controversy — a few years back.

Tucows and Namecheap exit $14m .online deal

Tucows and Namecheap have both pulled out of their joint venture with Radix to run the .online registry.
Tucows revealed the move, which will see Radix run .online solo, in a press release yesterday.
Both Tucows and Namecheap are registrars, whereas Radix is pretty much focused on being a registry nowadays.
While financial terms have not been disclosed, Tucows CEO Elliot Noss had previously said that each of the three companies had funded the new venture to the tune of $4 million to $5 million.
I estimate that this puts the total investment in the deal — which includes the price of winning .online at auction — at $13 million to $14 million.
Noss has also hinted that the gTLD sold for much more than the $6.8 million paid for .tech.
.online has not yet been delegated.

Noss hints at winning .online auction bid

A triumvirate of domain name companies led by Radix paid well over $7 million for the .online new gTLD, judging by comments made by Tucows CEO in an analysts call yesterday.
As the company reported its third-quarter financial numbers, Noss said of .online, which was recently auctioned:

While we are bound by confidentiality with respect to the value of the transaction, we can point to amounts paid in other gTLDs’ auctions in the public domain — like $6.8 million for .tech, $5.6 million for .realty, or the $4.6 million that Amazon paid for .buy — and let you decide what you think .online should be valued, relative to those more narrowly targeted extensions.

Radix won the private auction with financial backing from Tucows and NameCheap.
The three companies intend to set up a new joint venture to manage the .online registry, as we reported yesterday, with each company contributing between $4 million and $5 million.
Assuming at least one company is contributing $4 million and at least one is contributing $5 million, that works out to a total of $13 million to $14 million, earmarked for the auction and seed funding for the new venture.
Based on that knowledge, an assumption that the new company will want a couple of million to launch, and Noss’s comments yesterday, I’d peg the .online sale price in the $10-12 million range.
Radix business head Sandeep Ramchamdani told us yesterday that the company plans to market .online with some “hi-decibel advertising” and participation in events such as Disrupt and South by Southwest.

Russian hackers breaking in to NameCheap accounts

If you have an account at NameCheap, now might be a good time to think about changing your password.
According to the registrar, hackers based in Russia are using a haul of a reported 4.5 billion username/password combinations to attempt to break into its customers’ accounts.
Some attempts have been successful, NameCheap warned.
The attackers are using credentials stolen from third-party sources in a large-scale, automated attempt to log in to user accounts, disguised as regular users, the company said in a blog post.
NameCheap said:

The vast majority of these login attempts have been unsuccessful as the data is incorrect or old and passwords have been changed. As a precaution, we are aggressively blocking the IP addresses that appear to be logging in with the stolen password data. We are also logging these IP addresses and will be exporting blocking rules across our network to completely eliminate access to any Namecheap system or service, as well as making this data available to law enforcement.
While the vast majority of these logins are unsuccessful, some have been successful. To combat this, we’ve temporarily secured the Namecheap accounts that have been affected and are currently contacting customers involved requesting they improve the security for these accounts.

Affected users have been emailed, the company said.
NameCheap suspects the attack is linked to a reported cache of 1.2 billion unique username/password combinations amassed by a hacker group from databases vulnerable to SQL injection.
The registrar pointed out that its own systems haven’t been hacked. Customers should only be vulnerable if they use the same username and password at NameCheap as they use on other sites.

NameCheap gets contract breach notice

ICANN has sent a formal breach notice to top ten registrar NameCheap, saying the company failed to comply with a mandatory audit.
ICANN also claims in the notice (pdf) that the company has failed to keep its web site up to date with pricing information required by policies.
NameCheap, which says it has over three million domains under management, may be the largest registrar to get to the formal, published breach notice stage of the ICANN compliance process.
But it should be noted that while the company is accredited and must comply with its Registrar Accreditation Agreement, it does almost all of its business as an eNom reseller.
Just a handful of domain names are registered under NameCheap’s own IANA number.

NameCheap: a top ten registrar?

eNom reseller NameCheap is actually in the top 10 largest registrars in terms of domains under management, judging by data in regulatory documents filed by eNom parent Rightside.
According to a Rightside SEC filing related to its spin-off from Demand Media, NameCheap accounted for 23% of the company’s total domains under management as of September 30.
With the same document declaring Rightside has over 12 million names under management as of the same date, NameCheap apparently looks after just under 2.8 million domains.
By my reckoning, this means NameCheap is very probably the ninth-largest registrar by DUM out there, sandwiched between GMO Internet and FastDomain.
My comparison is not completely apples-to-apples — NameCheap’s number may include ccTLD registrations and I’m levering the company into a gTLDs-only league table — so may not be fully reliable.
But it’s the first solid indication of the size of NameCheap’s business I’ve seen in a while.
While NameCheap is accredited by ICANN in its own right, it has never registered more than a handful of domains under its own name, leaving it in the sub-900 range in the DUM league table.
According to Rightside, NameCheap is under contract to exclusively use eNom’s wholesale services until December 2014, but the deal does have one-year renewals built in.

Second .online gTLD bid and third ‘guardian’ dot-brand withdrawn

Directi appears to be the last man standing in the three-way tie-up for .online, following the latest new gTLD withdrawals.
Namecheap has dropped its .online application, closely following Tucows, which dropped its bid a couple of weeks ago.
The three companies announced a deal in March to see them cooperate to win the contested TLD, but at the time it wasn’t clear which applicants would pull out.
Directi’s bid (filed by DotOnline Inc under the Radix brand) remains. It has already passed Initial Evaluation, which may be part of the reason its application was chosen as the “winner”.
The gTLD is still contested, however. Directi is competing with Donuts, I-Registry and Dot Online LLC.
Separately today, a curious two-way dot-brand battle seems to have had its final twist, with Guardian Life Insurance’s withdrawal of its application for .guardianlife.
The insurance company and newspaper publisher Guardian News and Media had both applied for gTLDs containing the string “guardian”. There were originally five, but only two remain.
It now looks like Guardian News will get .theguardian, having previously conceded .guardian to its brand rival and dropping its bid for .guardianmedia.
It appears that there’s been more than a bit of strategic applying, and maybe some deal-making, here.
Neither remaining application is contested, and neither have objections. It’s likely that .guardian is captured by the Governmental Advisory Committee’s advice against “closed generics”, however.

Tucows, Directi and Namecheap to combine .online gTLD bids

Three applicants for the .online gTLD appear to have settled their differences in what I believe is the first public example of new gTLD contention set consolidation.
Tucows, Directi and Namecheap said today that that they plan to “work together to manage the .online registry.” From the press release:

applicants for the same TLDs have begun to compete, negotiate, and, in some cases, join forces to ultimately produce one winning bid.
The first such alliance was revealed today, when domain industry veterans Directi, Tucows and Namecheap announced that they would work together to manage the .online registry.

The companies are of course three of the most successful domain name registrars out there.
The press release does not specify how the combination will be carried out. Under ICANN rules, two of the applicants would have to drop their applications. It’s not possible to resubmit as a joint venture.
It also does not acknowledge that there are three other applicants for .online — Donuts and smaller portfolio applicants Dot Online LLC and I-REGISTRY Ltd — which are not party to the agreement.