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Afilias wants to buy your failed gTLD

Kevin Murphy, July 7, 2015, Domain Registries

Afilias is on an overt campaign to snap up struggling new gTLDs at bargain basement prices.
“In the neighborhood of a dozen” gTLD operators responded seriously to Afilias’ booth at last month’s ICANN meeting in Buenos Aries, (pictured), Afilias chief marketing officer Roland LaPlante told DI in an interview today.
The company could potentially buy up tens of gTLDs over the coming year, LaPlante said.
“If all of these 500 strings with less than 5,000 names in them start looking for a new owner, it’s going to be a pretty active marketplace,” he said.
Afilias
“There are entrants in the market who either have found the market is not as they expected, or results are not what they need, or for whatever other reason they’re coming to the conclusion this isn’t the business they should be in and they’re looking for options,” LaPlante said.
“There’s been a cold splash of water in the face for a lot of people who didn’t expect it, they’re struggling with relatively low revenues compared to what they might have expected,” he said. “They’re likely to be looking for options.”
Afilias would be happy to take these contracts off their current owners’ hands, for the right price.
“Frankly, we’re not going to be paying huge prices for them,” LaPlante.
“We’ve run into a number of folks who still have fairly inflated opinions of what their string is worth,” he said. “Some of these strings are attractive, but they’re going to need a lot more time to mature.”
Afilias believes that the economies of scale it already has in place would enable it to turn a profit at a much lower registration volume, perhaps under 50,000 names, and that it has the patience and financial strength to wait for its acquisitions to hit those volumes.
“We’re very conservative in our volume estimates,” LaPlante said.
Afilias currently has 26 new gTLDs as back-end and 13 as contracted registry operator.
The company is basically looking for acquisitions where the seller’s looming alternative might be the Emergency Back-End Registry Operator, and where the fees associated with an auction might be a bit too rich.
While LaPlante jokingly compared the proposition to the “We Buy Any Car” business model, he admitted that some registries are less attractive than others.
gTLDs with a lot of restrictions or monitoring would be treated with much more caution — Afilias was not interested in .hiv, which failed to sell at auction recently, for example — and would be skeptical about registries that have given away large numbers of free domains.
“We’d like to pick up strings that have good potential for a profitable amount of volume,” he said.
Afilias quietly sold .meet to Google earlier this year, but LaPlante denied that Afilias is in the business of flipping gTLDs. While he could not get into details, he said the .meet deal was a “special case”.
As we discovered last week, at least eight new gTLDs have changed ownership since signing their registry contracts. A few others have been acquired pre-contracting.

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

Kevin Murphy, July 7, 2015, Domain Registries

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.

New musical named after (and uses) new gTLD domain

Kevin Murphy, July 3, 2015, Domain Sales

How’s this for a high-profile registrant?
A new stage musical, co-written by Blur front-man Damon Albarn, has opened in the UK this week, and it’s named after a new gTLD domain name.
wonder.land is a take on Alice in Wonderland that reportedly “tells the story of a 21st Century teen who immerses herself in a psychedelic online game.”
The production, which is running previews in Manchester until July 12 before transferring to the National Theatre in London this November, is using the domain wonder.land.
Reviews have been mixed.
.land is a Donuts gTLD with about 13,000 domains in its zone.
Chrome users who search for wonder.land in their browser address bar will be taken to the domain rather than a search results page.

Free .cloud domains on offer to pioneer brands

Kevin Murphy, July 2, 2015, Domain Registries

Aruba, the recently anointed .cloud gTLD registry, plans to give away up to 100 free .cloud domains to trademark owners as part of its launch program.
The Italian company also today revealed a rough launch schedule that will see sunrise begin mid-way through the fourth quarter.
Participating in Aruba’s “Pioneer” program will be free for trademark owners with a decent marketing plan, a brand-match domain, and a web site that can go live at the end of September.
Up to 100 domains can be allocated for promotional purposes before sunrise begins, per ICANN rules.
Those looking to grab a generic dictionary word in .cloud “may require further negotiation and incur additional costs”, the registry web site says.
Wannabe pioneers have until August 21 to submit their ideas.
Aruba, which beat Minds + Machines, Symantec, Amazon, Google, CloudNames and Donuts to .cloud at private auction last November, plans to go to general availability early next year.

New gTLD sales miss ICANN estimates by a mile

Kevin Murphy, July 2, 2015, Domain Registries

New gTLD registration volumes failed to live up to ICANN’s expectations by a long, long way in its fiscal 2015.
When ICANN’s FY15 ended on Tuesday, new gTLDs had fewer than 6 million domains in their collective zone files.
That’s just 18% of ICANN’s original early 2014 estimate of 33 million domains and just 39% of its revised March 2015 estimate of 15 million names.
It’s going to be harder to compare future new gTLD performance to ICANN’s projections, as the program enters its second year of live activity.
The organization’s recently published draft fiscal 2016 budget does not have a “total registrations” number to compare to the 15/33 million projection in last year’s budget.
It does, however, predict 12.5 million billable registrar transactions in FY16, which began yesterday.
Billable registrar transactions include renewals and transfers, however, so ICANN is not saying that there will be 12.5 million extant new gTLD registrations this time next year.

You might be surprised how many new gTLDs have changed hands already

Kevin Murphy, July 1, 2015, Domain Registries

At least 86 new gTLD registry contracts have changed hands since the end of 2013, I have discovered.
ICANN calls the transfer of a Registry Agreement from one company to another an “assignment”. Global Domains Division staff said in Buenos Aires last week that it’s one of the more complex and time-consuming tasks they have to perform.
So I thought I’d do a count, and I discovered some interesting stuff.
Donuts/Rightside
The biggest beneficiary of incoming assignments so far is of course Rightside, aka United TLD Holdco, which has so far taken over 23 of the gTLDs applied for by Donuts.
The two companies have had an agreement since the start that allows Rightside to take on as many as 107 of Donuts’ original 307 applications.
Interestingly, Rightside sold .fan to AsiaMix Digital after Donuts had transferred the gTLD to it.
Amazon
We also discover that Amazon is repatriating its gTLD contracts en masse.
So far, 21 gTLDs applied for by Amazon EU Sarl — the Luxembourg-based company Amazon uses to dodge tax in other European countries — have been transferred to US-based Amazon Registry Services Inc.
Amazon EU has made money losing new gTLD auctions.
Given the company’s usual MO, I have to wonder whether Amazon Registry Services, under the US tax regime, plans to make any money at all from its new raft of gTLDs.
Subsidiary changes
Speaking of tax, four gTLDs associated with the Hong Kong-based Zodiac group of applicants have been transferred to new Cayman Islands companies with similar names.
A bunch of the other assignments appear to be registries shifting contracts between various subsidiaries.
IG Group, a large UK derivatives trader, has assigned seven gTLDs (such as .forex, .markets and .spreadbetting) to newly created UK subsidiaries, for example.
Also, Ireland-based Afilias transferred the .green RA to a new Irish subsidiary, while Germany-based .srl applicant mySRL has sent its contract to a Florida-based sister company from the InternetX stable.
There are several other example of this kind of activity.
Actual acquisitions
As best as I can tell, there have been only eight actual post-contracting acquisitions so far: .trust, .fan, .meet, .reise, .xn--ses554g, .rent, .theatre, and .protection.
The only one of those I didn’t know about — and haven’t seen reported anywhere — was .meet, which Afilias seems to have sold to Google back in February.
It should be noted that while I’ve counted 86 assignments, I may have missed some. At least one — XYZ.com’s acquisition of .security from Symantec, does not appear have been completed yet, judging by ICANN’s web site.

Afilias promises cash for LGBT cause with .lgbt sales

Kevin Murphy, June 30, 2015, Domain Registries

Afilias has promised to donate a slice of .lgbt registration fees to a LGBT organization for the next few months.
The company, which acts as registry for .lgbt, said it will give $20 to the It Gets Better Project for every name registered through October 11.
It Gets Better is a US-based non-profit devoted to supporting LGBT people through their often rough teenage years.
Afilias said the promotion is meant to celebrate the recent legalization of same-sex marriage in the US and Ireland.
The October 11 end date was picked because that is National Coming Out Day in the US.
.lgbt names currently retail for roughly $45 to $60 a year.

First example of .sucks cybersquatting?

Kevin Murphy, June 30, 2015, Domain Registries

The .sucks domain has been generally available for a little over a week now, and I’ve found what may be the first example of somebody attempting to sell one to a brand owner.
amherstcollege.sucks is one of only a handful on non-registry-owned .sucks domains to have a web site already indexed by Google.
The site solicits commentary about Amherst College — a liberal arts university in Massachusetts that owns a US trademark on “Amherst” — but does not yet publish any such criticism.
However, the phrases “AMHERSTCOLLEGE.SUCKS DOMAIN NAME + WEBSITE IS FOR SALE” and “IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN PURCHASING THIS DOMAIN AND WEBSITE CONTACT US” appear prominently on the bare-bones WordPress blog currently running at the site.
The Whois record shows “THIS DOMAIN IS FOR SALE” as the registrant organization.
Under the UDRP, offering a domain for sale is usually considered enough to meet the “bad faith” part of the three-prong cybersquatting test.
I doubt it’s the only example of a .sucks domain matching a brand currently listed for sale by a third-party registrant, but it is the first one showing up in Google.
It’s still early days; the other .sucks domains with sites and a Google presence are a mix of redirects, mirroring and placeholders.
Microsoft-owned microsoft.sucks is one of them. It redirects to a Bing search results page.
The $250-a-year .sucks gTLD, managed by Vox Populi registry, currently has fewer than 5,700 domains in its zone file. Growth has ground almost to a halt over the last few days.

AlpNames claims to be second-largest new gTLD registrar

Kevin Murphy, June 24, 2015, Domain Registrars

A little-known registrar with close ties to Famous Four Media says it is now the second-largest seller of new gTLD domains, after Go Daddy.
AlpNames said it has 500,000 new gTLD domains under management, overtaking Network Solutions into the number-two position.
Its number for February, the last month for which registry reports are available, has the registrar with a DUM of under 50,000.
The vast majority of the names it sells or gives away are in gTLDs in the Famous Four portfolio — namely .science, .party and .webcam.
It’s currently selling those for $0.49 each, a $0.24 markup on the current promotional registry fee.
Factoring out the ICANN transaction fee, AlpNames has a margin of just a few cents per name.
Previously, it has given away .science names for free.
AlpNames is Famous Four’s neighbor in Gibraltar and owns domains such as register.science, indicating a very close relationship between the two companies.

XYZ buys .security and .protection from Symantec

Kevin Murphy, June 24, 2015, Domain Registries

XYZ.com has added .security and .protection to its portfolio of new gTLDs under a private deal with security software maker Symantec.
Symantec originally applied for both as closed generics, but changed its plans when ICANN changed its tune about exclusive access gTLDs.
The company won .security in an auction against Donuts and Defender Security late last year; .protection was uncontested. It lost auctions for .cloud and .antivirus.
Symantec’s .symantec and .norton, both dot-brands, are currently in pre-delegation testing.
XYZ already owns .college, .rent and of course .xyz.
In other news, Afilias has acquired .promo, which was in PDT with applicant Play.Promo Oy, in a private auction.
UPDATE: A couple of hours after this post was published, XYZ announced it has also acquired .theatre, which will compete with Donuts’ .theater, from KBE gTLD Holding Inc.