XYZ counting standard sales as “premiums” because its fees are so expensive

Portfolio gTLD registry XYZ appears to be counting regular sales of domains in certain TLDs as “premium” wins, because the base reg fee is so high.

The company said in a recent blog post that it sold over 270 “premium” names in October, but it added the following caveat:

Premium XYZ Registry domains refer to premium domains for extensions with standard and premium domains, and XYZ’s premium namespaces such as .Cars, .Storage, .Tickets, .Security, etc.

So if a name in a .com-equivalent priced TLD such as .xyz had been flagged as a premium by the registry and sold for a few thousands bucks, that counts as a premium sale, but any sale at all in .cars, where all domains cost a few thousand bucks regardless of the second-level string, also counts as a premium.

This reporting practice appears to bring in .security, .storage, .protection, .car, .auto, and .theatre, which all retail for four figures as standard. It also includes .tickets, where you won’t get much change out of a grand. It doesn’t include the fourth member of the cars family, .autos, where domains are priced as .com-equivalent.

I’m not sure how I feel about this.

You can’t accuse the registry of being misleading — it’s disclosing what it’s doing pretty prominently mid-post, not even reducing the font size.

And you can’t reasonably argue that a standard $3,000 .cars domain, which renews at $3,000 a year, for example, has less claim to the adjective “premium” than a domain in .hair that has a premium-tier EPP code selling for $3,000 but renewing at $20.

It just feels weird to see the word used in this way for what appears to be the first time.

Ahead of GoDaddy acquisition, MMX to scrap premium fees on 725,000 domains

MMX plans to remove hundreds of thousands of domains from its premium list later this month, and reduce prices on a hundred thousand more.

Dubbed The Great Release, the April 23 adjustment will see 725,400 names currently reserved at premium prices released to the available pool at the usual wholesale fee for their respective gTLDs.

Another 102,000 names will keep a premium ticket, but will see their price reduced. MMX says it’s wiped $145 million from the list price of a total of 827,000 names.

The names are available in 26 of MMX’s portfolio of new gTLDs, which GoDaddy currently intends to buy for $120 million.

An MMX spokesperson said that the current pricing had been in place since 2014 and was up for review. He said:

Premium pricing is not something that had been looked at in great detail since it launched its TLDs, and MMX felt that its pricing was out of step with current market trends. MMX also saw that it had held back much of its inventory without ever releasing it, and following a large volume of enquiries over the last 12 months, MMX decided to release all reserved names to get them into the hands of users.

A searchable database of releasing names can be found here, but you’ll need to hand over your email address to access it.

.jobs plans to raise millions from premium names after dumping its sponsor

Third time lucky for .jobs?

Having had its first two business models fail, Employ Media has appealed to ICANN to scrap the cumbersome restrictions that have dogged .jobs for 15 years and allow it to raise potentially millions by auctioning off premium domains.

.jobs is one of a handful of “sponsored” gTLDs applied for in the 2003 round, but now it wants to dump its sponsor and substantially liberalize its eligibility policies.

.jobs has been sponsored by the Society for Human Resource Management since its approval by ICANN back in 2005, but Employ Media wants a divorce.

It’s also asking ICANN to promise not to fire barrages of lawyers at it if (or, more likely, when) it attempts to auction off tens of thousands of premium .jobs domains, some of which are currently carrying six-figure asking prices.

The gTLD was one of a handful approved in the 2003 “Sponsored TLD” round, an experimental early effort to introduce top-level competition, which also produced TLDs including .xxx, .asia, .cat and .mobi.

.jobs was originally restricted in two primary ways: only card-carrying HR professionals could register names, and they could only register the name of the company they worked for.

As you might imagine, the domains didn’t exactly fly off the shelves. By January 2010 fewer than 8,000 names had been registered, while the likes of .mobi — also “sponsored”, but far less restricted — were approaching one million.

So Employ Media took a gamble, creating what it called Universe.jobs. It registered about 40,000 domains representing professions like nursing.jobs and geographic terms like newyork.jobs, and populated the sites with job listings provided in partnership with the non-profit DirectEmployers Association.

As I reported extensively in DI’s early days, ICANN saw this as a breach of its Registry Agreement and threatened to terminate the contract. But Employ Media fought back, and ICANN eventually retreated, allowing Universe.jobs to go ahead.

I’ve thought so little about .jobs in the last eight years that I didn’t notice that Universe.jobs had also crumbled until today.

It seems DirectEmployees terminated the deal in 2018 after the registry refused to give it a bigger slice of revenue, then launched a competing for-profit service called Recruit Rooster, stranding Employ Media without a key revenue stream.

The registry sued (pdf) last year, accusing DirectEmployers of stealing its clients in violation of their agreement. While DirectEmployers denied the claims (pdf), the lawsuit was nevertheless settled last November, according to court documents.

That didn’t solve the problem of Employ Media not having a strong business model any more, of course.

So the company wrote to ICANN back in April to ask for changes to its Registry Agreement, enabling it to split from SHRM after 15 years of nominal oversight and create its own “independent” HR Council to oversee .jobs policy.

The Council would be made up of HR professionals not employed by Employ Media and would make seemingly non-binding “recommendations” about registry policy.

The proposed changes also reduce registrant eligibility to what looks like a box-checking exercise, as well as permitting Employ Media to sell off “noncompanyname” domains at auction or for premium fees.

Under the current contract, you can only register a .jobs domain if you’re a salaried HR professional and are certified by the Human Resource Certification Institute.

If the proposed changes are approved by ICANN, which seems very likely given ICANN’s history of pushing through contract amendments, the new rule will be:

Persons engaged in human resource management practices that are supportive of a code of ethics that fosters an environment of trust, ethical behavior, integrity, and excellence (as exemplified in the current Society for Human Resource Management (“SHRM”) Code of Ethical and Professional Standards in Human Resource Management or other similar codes) each, a “Qualified Applicant” may request registration of second-level domains within the TLD.

Sounds rather like something that could easily be buried in the Ts&Cs or dealt with with a simple check-box at the checkout.

The proposed new contract further guts the restricted nature of the TLD and removes the ability of the new sponsor (essentially the registry itself) to increase eligibility requirements in future.

Another amendment not flagged up prominently by ICANN on its public comment page specifically permits the registry to launch a “Phased Allocation Program” for generic second-level names, what it calls “noncompanyname” domains:

Registry Operator may elect to allocate the domain names via the following processes: 1) Request for Proposals (RFP) to invite interested parties to propose specific plans for registration, use and promotion of domains that are not their company name; 2) By auction that offers domains not allocated through the RFP process; and 3) A first-come, first-served real-time release of any domains not registered through the RFP or auction processes. Registry Operator reserves the right to not allocate any of such names. The domain names included within the scope of the Phased Allocation Program shall be limited to noncompanyname.TLD domain names, not including all reserved names as identified in Specification 5 of this Agreement.

Basically, Employ Media plans to sell off the tens of thousands of Universe.jobs domains it still has registered to itself, potentially raising millions in the process. One and two-character domains will also be released, subject to ICANN rules.

Many of these domains, even universe.jobs itself, seem to have make-an-offer landing pages already, with suggested prices such as $500,000 for hotel.jobs and $750,000 for us.jobs.

Bizarrely, these landers have a logo branding .jobs as “a legacy TLD”, a slogan I imagine is meaningless to almost anyone outside the domain industry and not particularly evocative or sexy.

The sum of all this is that .jobs is arguably on the verge of becoming a sponsored TLD in name only, with the potential for a big windfall for the registry.

Oh, and it’s all up for public comment before ICANN gives final approval to the contract changes. Comments close November 16.

Will anyone begrudge the company a chance at success, after 15 years of being handcuffed by its own policies?

I can imagine Donuts may have a view, operating as it does the competing .careers, which currently has fewer than 8,000 regs and is almost certainly the weaker string.

Palestine to release all one-character .ps domains, at a price

In a couple of weeks, you’ll be able to register single-character domains under the Palestinian ccTLD, .ps.
Local registry PNINA, the Palestinian Nation Internet Naming Authority, says that on January 6 at 0800 UTC it will add these names to its premium list, making them available via approved registrars.
Wholesale prices for the first year appear to be $2,000 across the board, with a $500-a-year renewal fee. Registrants can expect to pay more at the registrar check-out.
There are no local presence eligibility requirements under PNINA policy.
While investing in ccTLDs always carries some risk and uncertainty, one imagines that .ps may be riskier than most over the long term. It’s been on the ISO 3166 list of two-letter country codes for 20 years and has been in the root since 2000, but Palestine is not a full member of the United Nations.

.CLUB lowers premium prices to sell through registrars

.CLUB Domains has lowered the price of many of its reserved “premium” domain names in order to make them more easily available via the registrar channel, the company announced today.
Dozens of names previously priced above $20,000, and therefore only available via brokers, have been reduced to between $10,000 and $19,000, according to chief marketing officer Jeff Sass.
The company’s EPP system has tiered pricing and the top tier is $20,000, so registrars are not able to directly sell higher-priced names.
Sass said some of the repriced names include nyc.club, travellers.club, delivery.club, biking.club, fun.club, growth.club and home.club.

MMX makes $100,000 .luxe premium sale

MMX says it has sold a package of premium .luxe domain names for $100,000.
The registry announced this week that it has sold “a small number of .luxe names for a combined value of $100,000 in a single trade”.
Depending on what that “small number” is, the individual per-domain value may not be all that much.
MMX CEO Toby Hall would only tell DI that the package comprises fewer than 100 domains.
That would still put at least a four-figure price on each domain, which I’m sure many domainers would regard as near-miraculous for a string such as .luxe.
.luxe was originally intended to have a connection to luxury goods, but MMX has repurposed it as its inroad to the blockchain space.
Domains are being primarily sold to address cryptocurrency wallets, primarily in Asia, in the Ethereum blockchain.
There are currently over 5,700 domains in the .luxe zone file.

MMX sells 7,000 domains for $3.4 million

New gTLD registry MMX said it has sold $3.4 million in “premium” .vip domains names to Chinese domainers in the last few months.
In what is believed to be a small number of deals to a limited number of investors, “over 7,000” domains changed hands since they became available in late June.
MMX said that $2.8 million of the deals closed in the last 10 days.
While we don’t have the exact number of domains, it looks to work out in the ball-park of $485 per domain.
As $3.4 million is a materially significant number — the company’s entire revenue for 2016 was $15.6 million — it was disclosed to the financial markets this morning.
.vip has been MMX’s cash cow, so far amassing a zone file with more than 600,000 domains names in it.
For some reason it has been hugely popular in China — the vast majority of its registrations have been through Chinese registrars and 59% of its overall revenue was from China in 2016.
In April, the company sold 200,000 .vip names to a single Chinese investor for $1.3 million.
MMX has also said that renewal rates for .vip, which only launched last year, have been over 75%.

XYZ slashes $10 million a year from premium stash

XYZ.com has slashed the asking price of a few thousand “premium” .xyz domain names, in some cases by many thousands of dollars.
Overall, it looks like the company has dropped prices by a total of $10.8 million.
At the top end of its reserved list, several single and double-character domains previously priced a $55,000 per year have been reduced to $13,000 per year.
At the lower end, domains previously priced at around $1,300 are now around $300.
Those are the recommended retail prices. Some registrars are offering them with a substantial mark-up.
The reductions affect 2,700 of the domains on XYZ’s premium list, which runs to about 3,075 names in total.
Whereas the previous hypothetical value of the full list was $15.3 million a year, it’s now at $4.4 million a year.
Of course, they’re not worth anything unless somebody is willing to pay the price, and the domains still seem to have end-user price tags on them.
Premium renewal fees have so far proved unpopular in the domain investing community due to the large carrying cost.
XYZ’s full list can be obtained here.

Short .vegas domains go on sale

Dot Vegas has made one and two-character .vegas domain names available to register on a first-come, first-served basis.
Single-character domains such as a.vegas and 7.vegas and two-character names such as 77.vegas and bj.vegas all appear to be available, including domains that match country-code TLDs.
Prices seem to be around the $2,750 to $3,299 mark for the one-character names at the three registrars Dot Vegas plugged in its announcement.
For the two-character names, you’re looking at $550 to $699, again depending on registrar.
Renewal fees for these short names seem to be about double what you’d expect to pay per year for a regular .vegas name, starting at over $100 per year.
Of the three promoted registrars — GoDaddy, Uniregistry and NameCheap — Uniregistry appears to be the cheapest and GoDaddy the most expensive.
The .vegas gTLD has been on the market for about three years and has about 16,000 domains in its zone file currently.

.club financing option sees early traction with $150k sales

.CLUB Domains said it has seen some early successes with its new 0% financing option, selling $150,000 worth of premium .club domains in its first week.
The registry announced that it sold 39 premiums for a total of $149,480, and that 37 of those names were sold using the financing option.
This option allows registrants to spread the cost of their domains over five years — 60 monthly payments — for names priced over $1,000.
The scheme was announced at the NamesCon conference in conjunction with a new brokers program, which gives brokers the ability to pass on 10% discounts to their clients and earn 15% commissions.
Seventeen of the 39 names were sold via brokers.
The results of the the first seven days of these programs compare favorably to other periods. In the fourth quarter of 2016, .CLUB said premium sales were $112,000.
For the whole of 2016, the registry sold $941,000 of reserved premium names, making a total of $4.3 million since .club launched May 2014.