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Rightside new gTLD renewals can top 80%

Kevin Murphy, October 14, 2016, Domain Registries

Rightside says it is seeing encouraging renewal figures from its oldest batch of new gTLDs.
The company this week revealed that renewals after two years of ownership on average stand at 81%.
In a blog post, Rightside broke out some numbers for .dance, .democrat, .ninja, .immobilien, .social, .reviews and .futbol.
Those seven are the only ones in its portfolio to have gone through two full renewal cycles.
The renewal rate after year one was a modest 69% — in other words it lost almost a third of its installed base after 12 months — but this increased to 81% after the second year.
The actual number of domains involved in quite tiny — 81% equates to just 21,000 names across all seven TLDs.
Breaking out a couple of TLDs, Rightside wrote:

Our first gTLD to market, .DANCE, saw a 70% renewal rate in year one expand to 83% in year two for that same subset of domains. Our best performing gTLD of the seven is .IMMOBILIEN, which renewed at 83% in its first year, and grew to a stupendous 87% in its second—which certainly makes sense given the permanent nature of real estate.

But Rightside reckons the numbers reflect well on the new gTLD industry. It said:

domain investors with portfolios including new gTLDs recognize the long-term value of these domain names, and rather than let them drop after the first year, are holding onto them to find the right buyer continue to earn parking revenue. Second—and likely the more significant driver—is that end users are actually picking up these domain names and putting them to use.

Wildly popular Facebook scam attack hits .ninja

Kevin Murphy, May 20, 2015, Domain Registries

Rightside’s .ninja appears to be the victim of a broad, highly effective affiliate marketing scam that targets Indians and exploits Facebook’s trademark.
Today, 11 of the top 12 most-visited .ninja domains are linked to the same attack. Each has an Alexa ranking of under 15,000. They’re all in the top 40 new gTLD domain names by traffic, according to Alexa.
The domains are com-news.ninja, com-finance-news.ninja, com-important-finance-update.ninja, com-important-finance-news.ninja, com-important-update.ninja, com-important-news.ninja, com-important-news-update.ninja, com-finance-now.ninja, com-finance.ninja, com-news-now.ninja and com-personal-finance.ninja.
The domains do not directly infringe any trademarks and appear innocuous enough when visited — they merely redirect to the genuine facebook.com.
However, adding “facebook” at the third level leads users to pages such as this one, which contains a “work at home” scam.
Scam
Indian visitors are told that that Facebook will pay them the rupee equivalent of about $250 per day just for posting links to Facebook, under some kind of deal between Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.
It’s all nonsense of course. The page is filled with faked social media quotes and borrowed stock photos.
Not only that, but it uses Facebook’s logo and look-and-feel to make it appear, vaguely, like it’s a genuine Facebook site.
The links in the page all lead to an affiliate marketing campaign that appears, right now, to be misconfigured.
Infringing trademarks at the third level in order to spoof brands is not a new tactic — it’s commonly used in phishing attacks — but this is the first time I’ve seen it deployed so successfully in the new gTLD space.
It would be tricky, maybe impossible, for Facebook to seize the domains using UDRP or have them suspended using URS, given that the second-level domains are clean.
But it seems very probable that the domains are in violation of more than one element of Rightside’s anti-abuse policy, which among other things forbids trademark infringement and impersonation.

Rightside slashes new gTLD prices to $0.99

Kevin Murphy, April 13, 2015, Domain Registries

Rightside registrar eNom is to offer domains in several Rightside gTLDs for $0.99 over the coming days.
Today, .rocks domains can be obtained for the special price. They’re usually $12.99 a year.
The price does not apply to renewals. Customers have to use the promo code “pocketchange”.
Rightside stablemates .forsale, .reviews, .ninja and .social will get the $0.99 treatment for one day each over the coming week.
As we’ve learned over the last several months, super-cheap domains boost TLDs’ numbers as some of the internet’s less than ethical characters bulk-register thousands of throwaway domains at once.
So far, gTLDs such as .xyz, .country and .kim have been affected by these spikes, which I currently believe are related to typosquatting campaigns in legacy gTLDs.
I would not be at all surprised if Rightside becomes the latest registry to see its volume swell for similar reasons.

.ninja springs to life as a squirrel as 19 new gTLDs get delegated

Kevin Murphy, December 29, 2013, Domain Registries

ICANN may be taking Christmas week off, but Verisign apparently isn’t — another 19 new gTLDs were delegated to the DNS root system last night.
Most belong to Donuts: .training, .builders, .coffee, .codes, .education, .florist, .farm, .glass, .house, .holiday, .international, .institute, .solar, .repair and .solutions.
United TLD, the Demand Media/Rightside business that is also providing Donuts’ back-end, had .ninja and .kaufen (German for “buy”) delegated.
PeopleBrowsr’s .ceo also went live, as did I-REGISTRY’s .onl (for “online”).
Donuts is already redirecting its latest batch of nic.[tld] domains to donuts.co.
The web site at nic.ninja currently shows this image as part of a placeholder page:

UPDATE: It occurs to me that this might actually be a prairie dog or something, rather than a squirrel.