Westerdal offloads two more gTLDs to Donuts

Donuts has bulked out its gTLD portfolio yet again, acquiring two more strings from Fegistry and Top Level Spectrum.

ICANN records show that it recently took over the contracts for .observer and .realty.

They’re both launched, active TLDs. Both selling registries are backed by investor Jay Westerdal.

.observer was bought dormant by TLS from the British newspaper of the same name in 2016 and launched the following year with .com-competitive prices.

TLS has been marketing it as a place for news organizations, though it’s unrestricted. Registrations plateaued at about 1,000 a couple of years ago and haven’t seen much movement since.

.realty is a different story.

Fegistry paid ICANN $5,588,888 at a public auction — beating Donuts, in fact — in 2014, and launched it in 2017 with a roughly $300-a-year retail price.

It’s been cruising along with about 2,200 names under management for the last couple of years, until this September and early October, when its zone file shot up to almost 18,000 domains.

This seems to have been the result of a $0.99 promotion at Epik, which has since ended.

One would have to assume that the vast majority of those new domains will be speculative and are unlikely to renew at the full $300 reg fee a year from now.

While the contracts changed hands in late October, it’s inconceivable that Donuts was not aware of the quality of the recent registrations.

It’s not the first time Westerdal’s businesses have sold to Donuts, which took .contact off Top Level Spectrum’s hands in April 2019. That gTLD entered general availability this week.

It’s also handed off responsibility for .forum to MMX, which plans to launch it with a puzzling $1,000 price tag next March, although TLS is still listed as the ICANN contractor.

TLS still runs the controversial gripe site TLD .feedback, along with the unlaunched head-scratcher .pid.

Fegistry is still fighting for .hotel, along with rival applicants, in ICANN’s quasi-judicial Independent Review Process.

Dot-brand .bond has been acquired and will relaunch as a generic this July

The domain name’s Bond, dot Bond… or something.
Sorry.
ShortDot, the registry behind the .icu top-level domain, has acquired a dot-brand gTLD and plans to repurpose it as a generic.
The seller is Bond University, a newish, smallish university in Queensland, Australia, and the gTLD is .bond.
ShortDot co-founder Kevin Kopas confirmed the deal to DI tonight, and said the new owner hopes .bond will prove attractive to bail bondsmen, offerers of financial bonds and, yes, fans of the James Bond franchise.
There’s also the dictionary meaning of “bonding” with somebody in a familial, friendly or business sense.
A new Bond movie is due to come out next April, so .bond might pick up a few regs then, assuming the registry is careful not to too closely associate itself with the heavily-guarded IP.
Kopas said that the current plan is to launch a 60-day sunrise period July 9 this year. ShortDot is currently working on unbranding the TLD within its ICANN contract, to allow it to sell to an unrestricted audience.
Premium domains will be offered with premium renewal fees.
ShortDot also plans to move away from Neustar’s back-end to CentralNic.
Bond University never actually used its TLD, which would have been a single-registrant space for its own exclusive use. It’s been dormant since its 2014 delegation, with just a single placeholder domain in its zone file.
There are plenty of those. About 50 owners of unused dot-brands have chosen to terminate their ICANN contracts and simply fizzle away to nothing.
But a small handful of others have chosen to instead sell their contracts to registries that think they can make a bit of money marketing them as generic strings.
The most obvious example of this to date would be .monster, which XYZ.com recently relaunched as a quirky open generic after the jobs site Monster.com decided it didn’t need a dot-brand after all. It’s been on sale for about a month and has about 1,750 names in its zone file.
The first example, I believe, was .observer, which Top Level Spectrum acquired from the Observer newspaper in 2016. That TLD went on sale two years ago but has fewer than 1,000 domains under management today.
Kopas said that the plan is to sell .bond names for between $5 and $10 wholesale.
“Overall the goal of ShortDot is to offer domains that are affordable for end users and profitable for registrars,” he said.
It’s only the company’s second TLD. The first was .icu, which it bought from One.com (which hadn’t really used it) and relaunched in May 2018.
Since then, it’s grown extremely rapidly and is currently the eighth-largest new gTLD by zone file volume.
It had over 765,000 domains in its zone today, up from basically nothing a year ago, no doubt largely due to its incredibly low prices.
Before AlpNames died, it was selling .icu names to Chinese customers for the yuan equivalent of just $0.50.
Today, the domain is available from NameCheap and NameSilo, its two largest registrars, for about $1.50.
Remarkably, spam fighters haven’t highlighted much to be concerned about in .icu yet.
The TLD has a 6.4% “badness” rating with SpamHaus, roughly the same as the similarly sized MMX offering .vip, which is also popular in China, and lower than .com itself.
Compare to .loan, which has a bit over a million names and which SpamHaus gives a 28.7% “bad” score.
In other words, .icu seems to be doing very well, volume-wise, without yet attracting huge amounts of abuse.
It’s a neat trick, if you can pull it off. But is the success repeatable? I guess we’ll find out with .bond when it launches.

First dot-brand gTLD to go generic after TLS deal

The would-be dot-brand gTLD .observer will actually open as an unrestricted generic after the contract was bought out by Top Level Spectrum.
TLS, which has a small portfolio of gTLDs already, bought out the ICANN contract from UK newspaper publisher Guardian News and Media a couple of months ago, it emerged today.
The Observer is the title of the Guardian’s sister paper, published on Sundays.
But TLS CEO Jay Westerdal said it will be sold as a generic with pricing under $10 per name, as a thematic stable-mate for its gripe-oriented gTLD .feedback.
The price of the TLD has not been revealed, but Westerdal characterized it as a sub-$1 million deal.
It’s the first instance of a dot-brand, albeit one that that not yet gone live, being taken over by a portfolio gTLD player.
Westerdal said he’s looking for more, similar acquisition opportunities.
The gTLD is currently in pre-delegation testing, with no published go-live date.
The Guardian had signed a Registry Agreement containing Specification 9. That allows registries to disregard the Code of Conduct — which obliges them to treat registrars equally.
It seems likely this will have to be removed from the RA before .observer can go to the masses as a proper generic.