RightSide cuts super-premium fees in half, drops premium renewals

New gTLD registry RightSide has slashed the minimum price of its so-called “Platinum” tier premium domains and dropped renewal fees for these domains down to an affordable level.
The price changes come as part of two new marketing initiatives designed to start shifting more of its 14,000-strong portfolio of super-premiums through brokers and registrar partners.
The minimum first-year price of a Platinum-tier name has been reduced immediately from $50,000 to $25,000.
In addition, these domains will no longer renew every year at the same price. Instead, RightSide has reduced renewals to a more affordable $30.
“We weren’t selling them,” RightSide senior VP of sales and premiums Matt Overman told DI. “There is not a market for $50,000-a-year domain purchases.”
Now, “we feel comfortable enough with amount money we’re going to make up-front”, Overman said.
However, premium renewals are not being abandoned entirely; non-Platinum premium names will still have their original higher annual renewal fees, he said.
RightSide has sold some Platinum names in the five and six-figure range, but the number is quite small compared to overall size of the portfolio.
But Overman said that “none of them sold with a $50,000 renewal”. The highest renewal fee negotiated to date was $5,000, he said.
Before yesterday’s announcements, RightSide’s Platinum names were available on third-party registrars with buy-it-now fees that automatically applied the premium renewal fees.
However, it seems that the vast majority if not all of these sales came via the company’s in-house registrars such as Name.com and eNom, where there was a more flexible “make an offer” button.
Under a new Platinum Edge product, RightSide hopes to bring this functionality to its registrar partners.
It has made all 14,000 affected names registry-reserved as a result, Overman said. They were previously available in the general pool of unclaimed names and available to registrars via EPP.
Each affected name now has a minimum “access fee” of $25,000 (going up to $200,000 depending on name) that registrars must pay to release it.
They’re able to either negotiate a sale with a markup they can keep, or sell at “cost” (that is, the access fee) and claim a 10% commission, Overman said.
A separate Platinum Brokerage service has also been introduced, aimed at getting more professional domain brokers involved in the sales channel.
Brokers will be able to “reserve” up to five RightSide Platinum names for a broker-exclusivity period of 60 days, during which they’re expected to try to negotiate deals with potential buyers.
While no other brokers will be able to sell those names during those 60 days, registrars will still be able to sell those reserved names.
Overman said that if a registrar sells a name during the period it is under exclusivity with a participating broker, that broker will still get a commission from RightSide regardless of whether they were involved in the sale.
“We won’t give that name to any other broker, but if it sells through a registrar they still get their 10%,” he said. The registrar also gets its 10%.
This of course is open to gaming — brokers could reserve names and just twiddle their thumbs for 60 days, hoping to get a commission for no work — but the broker program is expected to be fairly tightly managed and those exploiting the system could be kicked out.
RightSide will be making the case for the two Platinum-branded offerings at the upcoming NamesCon conference in Las Vegas, where it also expects to name its first brokerage partners.

NamesCon confirms three more shows after being acquired

NamesCon says it has booked the venue for three more years of domain name conferences, following its acquisition this week.
The conference organizers said today that it has been acquired by 13-year-old German events outfit WorldHostingDays, which usually focuses on the hosting market, for an undisclosed sum.
NamesCon said in a press release that all existing commitments — such as tickets and sponsorship deals — will be honored, and that the same folk will still run the 2017 conference.
It said that it has booked the Tropicana hotel in Las Vegas, venue for the first three events, for the next three years.
The next three events will be held January 22 – 25, 2017, January 28 – 31, 2018 and January 27 – 30, 2019, the company said.
NamesCon focuses on the business of domain names, providing sessions on the buy and sell sides of the business.

Kinderis calls on industry to cut the bullshit

Domain Name Association chair Adrian Kinderis has called for the industry to “grow up”.
The former ARI CEO, now Neustar veep, said Monday it’s time for the industry to kick out the handful of bad actors that ruin its reputation, and to quit the “bullshit bickering” about which TLDs are best.
“For far too long this industry has turned a blind eye to the less than scrupulous activities,” he said, “and these activities have plagued this industry. Bad actors have tarnished the perception of this industry.”
“This may have been acceptable when it was a few insiders first grasping at a fledgling product in the early nineties but… we are now front and center of the internet,” he said.
“These practices of a few bad actors have led to the frustration of consumers. We have not served the best interests of our consumers at all times,” he said. “This has to change.”
He was speaking to an audience of registries, registrars and investors at the opening session of the NamesCon conference in Las Vegas on Monday.
It was a fairly standard DNA sales pitch, the kind Kinderis has given before, but few could deny the truth of his remarks.
He called upon the industry to more effectively self-regulate, working with ICANN, to keep the boogeymen of government legislators and law enforcement agencies at bay.
“It’s time to grow up and show that we can regulates ourselves and build a strong sustainable industry with integrity,” he said.
He also called for unity among industry participants, pointing out that the threats to their businesses are external to the domain industry.
“The domain name war must be over,” he said. “The infighting and bullshit bickering has to stop. The .coms, the not-.coms, the IDNs, the g’s versus the cc’s… this must stop.”
“As an industry we have been very lucky. We’ve stumbled through 20 years without a collective strategy nor cohesion,” he said. “Outside forces have not had a massive impact on us, yet. QR codes have tried. Apps are trying.”
He pointed to the recent positive “bump” that many domain companies have experienced as a result of investment from China, but attributed to “dumb luck” rather than the result of any smart marketing or outreach.
The 10-minute speech can be viewed below or on the NamePros YouTube channel.

Rightside to auction “xyz” domains at NamesCon

.xyz made a bit of a splash with domain investors in 2015, but is the meaningless string “xyz” inherently attractive? Even at the second level?
Rightside seems to think so.
The registry, which does not operate .xyz, is planning to auction at least four “xyz” domains during next Monday’s live auction at the NamesCon conference in Las Vegas.
Rightside today disclosed that xyz.sale, xyz.market, xyz.news and xyz.live will be among about a dozen registry-reserved short domain names– such as q.sale and z.pub — it will attempt to sell.
The only meaningful domain on its list is the absolutely fantastic, category-killing viral.video.
It’s difficult to see the “xyz” names as anything other than attempt to cash in on the popularity of .xyz domains among the investors, many of them Chinese, currently pumping money into the domain market.
XYZ.com’s .xyz gTLD has over 1.7 million domains in its zone file today, making it the largest-volume new gTLD by a considerable margin.
I’m not sure there’s any causal connection here, but it should probably be noted that Daniel Negari and Michael Ambrose, XYZ.com’s CEO and COO respectively, recently acquired a substantial chunk of Rightside.
The two men disclosed November 30 that they had paid over $8.5 million to buy almost 10 million shares — or roughly 5.2% of the company — on the open market.
The NamesCon auction kicks off at 1400 Pacific (2200 UTC) on Monday at the Tropicana in Vegas. It’s being managed by RightOfTheDot and Namejet.

NamesCon hotel “scam” doing the rounds

A company with a track record of misleading conference attendees into booking hotels with higher fees appears to be targeting NamesCon.
This morning I received a phone call from somebody claiming to be from NamesCon, but he pronounced it “Name Escon”.
I asked him what company he worked for, and he continued to insist he worked for “Name Escon”.
So I indulged him for a while, and it turned out he was trying to book me into a Las Vegas hotel for the duration of the January 10-13 trade show.
He offered me a rate at the Tropicana of $99 per night, including breakfast. That’s actually not a bad rate — about $20 less than what Expedia is currently asking.
I kept him on the phone until he sent an email to an address he had on file for me (the one from DI’s About page, which I don’t use to sign up for anything).
It arrived immediately, from Exhibitors Housing Services (ehshousing.com), which appears to be a Los Angeles company, with a link to housing-portal.com.
The link led to a credit card authorization form, pre-tailored to my details and the rate offered, which included some terms and conditions I didn’t like the look of.
A simple web search revealed that the company is widely believed to be Bad News.
The same outfit appears to regularly target annual conferences using the exhibitor lists published on earlier conference web sites. Contact information appears to be taken from the exhibitor’s own site.
According to the likes of Affiliate Summit and The Physiological Society, and the Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners and the Agricultural & Applied Economics Association these guys may charge up-front processing fees and/or have a very unfavorable cancellation policy.
In fact, just Googling for “Exhibitors Housing Services” will return pretty much nothing but scam warnings from various conference organizers.
One chap even posted a YouTube video explaining what he thinks the scam is.
I’m pretty certain the company has nothing to do with NamesCon.

Get NamesCon 2016 tickets at 80% off

After its well-received 2015 show in Las Vegas last month, NamesCon has confirmed a third annual domain name conference for 2016 and is offering deeply discounted tickets for “super early birds” until the end of the month.
Until February 28, conference passes can be bought for $199. That’s an 80% discount on the regular $999 fee. No other early-bird discounts have yet been announced, but NamesCon says this is the “lowest” price the tickets are going to get.
As the event is targeted largely at domainers, NamesCon notes that tickets are non-transferable. Touts are not welcome, in other words.
The show will run from January 10 to 13 next year, in Las Vegas. The venue will be the reasonably priced Tropicana hotel for the third year in a row.
Conference producer Richard Lau said that the 2016 show will have a new sponsorship opportunity in the form of a “Meetery” on the first day.
With space for about 30 companies on small tables, the six-hour window will be “ideal for companies who do not want to man a booth for the entire conference but still want to be able to meet with all of the attendees,” Lau said.
NamesCon is also expanding the number of small tables available for sponsors that want to exhibit for the whole four days from six to 15 to 20, he said.
Tickets can be obtained through the NamesCon web site.

New gTLD registries talk up marketing plans at NamesCon

This week’s NamesCon conference here in Las Vegas, which ended yesterday, offered several new domain registries the chance to talk about their efforts past and future to market new gTLDs.
One theme to emerge was how registries need to work with each other and with their registrar channel partners to raise awareness of alternatives to .com.
Donuts VP Dan Schindler said during a Tuesday keynote that the company plans to ramp up its marketing in 2015.
“There’s still a tremendous amount of work to be done by all the beneficiaries in this process,” he said, saying that Donuts intends to carry out a “broad education and awareness program over course of 2015 and beyond”.
He said the company is pursuing co-marketing efforts with some of its registrar partners at trade shows and such and “possibly including television”.
Schindler also spoke out against paid placement — where registries pay popular registrars for prominent shelf space — “not because we’re cheap”, but because Donuts doesn’t believe it offers registrants the best choice of relevant TLDs.
Here’s a photo of Schindler talking, offered for no other reason than it just cost me £6 to upload from my phone. Note the juxtaposition of a) the extensive Verisign .com/.net sponsorship, b) the Donuts “Not Com Revolution” messaging, and c) my thumb.

Uniregistry CEO Frank Schilling said in his keynote an hour later that he expected “more marketplace collaboration… where it is in our best interest to collaborate” on new gTLD promotion.
But he offered a somewhat dissenting tone with regards what he called the “dog and pony shows” of marketing new gTLDs.
Saying the company is “bootstrapping” some of its strings, he said big marketing spends now would lead to Uniregistry needing to raise its prices in two to three years to cover today’s costs.
Instead, he pointed to efforts such as its decision to release most of .click’s available names for a flat, cheap registration fee at launch, which he said should get names into the hands of users more quickly.
Contrarily, .CLUB Domains CEO Colin Campbell boasted during a brief pre-auction address on Tuesday of his company’s $2.2 million marketing spend for 2014, which he said would increase to $3.5 million in 2015.
Another recurring theme emerging from the conference (and from every other new gTLD event I’ve ever been to) was, as Schindler put it, that “use begets use”. The more high-profile sites a gTLD gets, the more likely it is to gain mindshare and sell more domains.
DotStrategy, the .buzz registry, is to be the beneficiary of such customer marketing.
Howard Lefkowitz, CEO of travel site operator One Degree World (which revealed it paid $100,000 for vegas.club earlier this week) revealed during NamesCon that some of his company’s city-related .buzz domains, such as sydney.buzz, are to feature for two weeks on the US TV game show Wheel Of Fortune as prize sponsors.
Will we see a bump in .buzz sales as a result? The gTLD currently has fewer than 8,500 names in its zone file, so if the TV time bears fruit it should be fairly easy to spot.

Seller’s remorse despite .club leading $1m NamesCon auction

The Right Of The Dot and SnapNames auction here at the NamesCon conference in Las Vegas last night raised just shy of $1 million, in what attendees broadly seem to agree was a successful event.
The grand total was $990,851, with 87 out of the 134 lots hitting their reserve and selling during the live/online bidding.
Leading the pack was homecare.com, which sold for $350,000.
But that deal actually closed before the live event began, leaving .CLUB Domains’ wine.club at the top of the sold list with a winning $140,000 bid.
Despite the sale, registry CEO Colin Campbell — evidently disappointed he had not placed a higher reserve on the name, expressed some seller’s remorse on Twitter this morning.

After selling .CLUB for 140,000 in auction I was a bit depressed. Is this normal? It was my favorite. #namescon pic.twitter.com/xMRIIzTFiT

— Colin.club (@ColinDotClub) January 14, 2015

.CLUB also offloaded reserved names weed.club ($16,000), fight.club ($13,500) and tequila.club ($8,000), among others.
.com of course had the best night, with carauctions.com going for $90,000, susan.com going for $34,000 and tik.com and vil.com both going for $33,000.
Organizer Mike Berkens took a $76,000 hit on sexeducation.com, which he purchased for $100,000 and sold without reserve for $24,000.
Also noteworthy was what I believe was the biggest bid of the night — a $1.2 million in-room bid for auctions.com, owned by .xyz registry CEO Daniel Negari.
The domain failed to meet its reserve, however, and will join the other unsold names in an extended online auction that begins this weekend.

Vegas.club sells for $100,000

.CLUB Domains said today it has sold the domain vegas.club for $100,000, and will help in its promotion as a members-only site for deals related to Las Vegas.
The deal was announced here at the NamesCon conference at the Tropicana hotel in Vegas.
The buyer is One Degree World Systems, a local company that develops booking sites for tourist destination cities worldwide.
I’m not sure the deal would be reportable as a straightforward domain-only sale, given that .CLUB said the companies have a “partnership” to develop the domain.
According to a company press release, the upcoming site will offer “members-only deals on nightclubs, hotels, shows, attractions and tours as well as concierge services, VIP status at local attractions, and white glove services like personal assistants on the ground, butler and nanny services and more.”
.CLUB had a similar relationship with its first big anchor tenant, the rapper 50 Cent, for the fan site 50inda.club.
It’s the second .club name the registry has sold for a six-figure sum. It sold coffee.club, also for $100,000, last year.
Right Of The Dot helped broker the vegas.club deal, the registry said.

NamesCon 2015 bigger, longer and more popular

NamesCon 2015 is due to kick of in Las Vegas this coming weekend with about 50% more attendees that its inaugural outing last year.
Organizers tell me that so far roughly 750 people (not including press and staff) have registered to attend the conference, which is taking place for the second year at the Tropicana hotel. That’s up from the roughly 525 registered a week before the 2014 event.
Some are expecting the final turnout to top 800.
Registrations were boosted as 2014 came to a close by the announcement that NamesCon had acquired the rights to use the longstanding DomainFest brand and domain to promote its own show.
The show is due to run from Sunday, January 11 to Wednesday, January 14, a day longer than the year-ago event.
NamesCon is a bit of a strange beast, catering heavily to domainers but with also a strong series of sessions aimed at digital brand managers and the intellectual property side of the industry.
Where else could you see sessions called “Workshop: I’m Getting Sued – What Do I Do Now?” and “Making the Most of Your .BRAND and the Evolving Internet” running side by side?
For domainers, a highlight of the week may be the live domain auction, which is being run by Right Of The Dot and SnapNames from January 13 from 1630 until 1930 local time.
There are 350 names going to auction, in an eclectic mix of legacy and new gTLDs.
Currently, slightly more than half of the 23 names with bids are new gTLD domains, though their asking prices are a lot lower than the .coms on the list — most seeing bids in the $250 range compared to a top .com bid fo $51,000 for agree.com.
Domains that do not sell during the live event will carry over to an extended auction that ends February 5.
TLD Registry, which runs a couple of Chinese-script new gTLDs, has a strong presence at NamesCon too, sponsoring a day-long session on the Chinese domain market on the Sunday.
Keynote speakers during the conference proper include Akram Atallah, president of ICANN’s Global Domains Division, as well as executives from Go Daddy, Donuts, Uniregistry and others.
DI will be in attendance. I’ve agreed to do a presentation on DI PRO and industry metrics on Sunday, probably sharing the stage with another tools vendor, on Sunday, but the exact time and location have yet to be confirmed.
Conference passes are still available for $799 from the NamesCon web site. Registration on the door goes up to $849. For context, that’s still less than half the price you’d paid to go to TRAFFIC.