woke.com among domains in NamesCon auction

Right Of The Dot has published the list of domains it hopes to help auction off during the forthcoming NamesCon 2023 conference in Texas, and my highlight has to be woke.com.

ROTD said in a press release that the headline lots of the auction, which seems to have 451 listed domains, are:

qd.com, oi.com, gorilla.com, holiday.com, programming.com, successful.com, estates.com, woke.com, fighting.com, dancing.com, cryptopunks.com, gpt.info, whois.io, software.ai, robots.ai, god.eth, nftx.com, shiba.com, we.co.uk, hi.co.uk, house.net, rap.hipHop, electricmotorcycles.com, and blackberries.com.

While woke.com is certainly not the domain with the best monetization/development potential, it catches the eye due to the fantastically divisive nature of the word itself, which is coming to dominate culture-wars political bullshit in the English-speaking world.

While “woke” ideology is arguably simply a modern restatement of the Golden Rule, it can mean very different things to different people — at one extreme it means welcoming the reintroduction of racial segregation and getting people fired for wearing a hat, and at the other it means buying a closet full of AR-15s because drag queens are coming to cut off your son’s penis.

The algorithm at the parking page it currently points to thinks it relates to beds.

It’s going to be fascinating to see who, if anyone, buys it, and what they do with it. It’s listed with a starting bid north of $250,000.

qd.com and estates.com both have starting bids above $1.5 million, while oi.com starts at over $1 million.

The auction runs online at rotd.com and live at NamesCon for the next three weeks.

Cahn says .hiphop premiums could show up at auction next month

“Premium” .hiphop domains could show up at auction next month, according to RightOfTheDot.

The company is planning a “digital asset auction” for February 24 and boss Monte Cahn said in a press release “you may also see some .hiphop premium reserve names as well as some other premium TLDs.”

Cahn is a partner in Dot Hip Hop, along with JJN Consulting and DigitalAMN, the new company currently battling ICANN bureaucracy for the right to have UNR’s .hiphop registry contract reassigned.

Along with 22 other UNR buyers, DHH is waiting for ICANN approval of its purchase. ICANN is wary and/or confused by UNR’s representations about matching blockchain alt-root TLDs that accompanied the sales.

The company plans to lower the cost of .hiphop names to bring them to a wider audience.

DHH filed a Request for Reconsideration with ICANN recently, to speed up a process that has so far taken almost six months, but withdrew it when it became clear it had merely triggered another time-consuming bureaucratic process.

ROTD was formed to coordinate gTLD auctions, but is perhaps better known nowadays for selling left-of-the-dot domains, such as at its annual NamesCon conference live auctions.

The company is currently seeking lots for its February 24 auction, including high-value domains and NFTs. The deadline for submissions is February 17.

.com-dominated NamesCon auction already has one million-dollar bid

There’s still about week to go until this year’s NamesCon conference kicks off in Las Vegas, but the live auction that will close the first day of the show has already seen pre-bidding action.
One batch of domains has already received a high bid of $1,010,000, but does not appear to have yet met its reserve.
The batch is led by bar.com, but also includes bar.net, cafes.com, grill.com, place.com, pub.com and shelter.com.
Another five domains on the list, all .com names, have attracted bids in six figures, topped by the $800,000 bid for ol.com.
The list of names up for pre-bid on NameJet (100 of which will hit the live auction) is dominated by Verisign TLDs — .com, obviously, and to a lesser extent .net and .tv.
The biggest pre-bid for a 2012-round gTLD is the $1,010 currently offered for gold.club, roughly 110th on the list as ordered by current bid.
The most active new gTLD auction is currently shoes.xyz, which has 28 bidders but a top bid of just $330.
I’m not sure how much can be inferred from pre-bids, but it certainly seems that most of the money from domain investors is still being put into short, one or two-word .com domains.
The auction will begin at 1500 US Pacific Time next Monday, January 23.
The auction is being managed and promoted by Right Of The Dot and NameJet. Would-be buyers need a NameJet account to participate.
Names not sold during the live event will go to an extended auction until February 9. ROTD’s Monte Cahn said this is in order to give Chinese bidders time to bid after Chinese New Year (January 28 this year).

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.

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.

ROTD lends geo names to CentralNic registrar push

CentralNic and Right Of The Dot have teamed up to offer a series of geographically themed registrar storefronts for new gTLDs.
Under a joint venture, the companies are launching sites such as london.domains, vegas.domains, tokyo.domains and nyc.domains.
ROTD, the new gTLD venture launched by Mike Berkens and Monte Cahn, acquired these premium domains from Donuts during the .domains Early Access Period.
The second level strings all match the third-party geo-gTLDs that will be offered via these sites. Another 12 will be launched before the end of the year, the companies said.
CentralNic, best known as a registry, will provide the back-end for the site, as part of its push into the registrar side of the market that kicked off with its $7.5 million acquisition of Internet.bs.

ROTD conducts first new gTLD auction as One.com wins .one

Danish registrar One.com has won the .one contention set in the first private auction carried out by new gTLD consultancy Right Of The Dot.
One.com beat Radix, the United Arab Emirates-based portfolio applicant, to the string. Radix withdrew its application last week. The price has not been disclosed.
ROTD, Mike Berkens and Monte Cahn-managed company, has been competing with Applicant Auction for contention set resolution services and this is its first win.
The .one auction was carried out using a “single sealed bid second price” methodology, in which all participants privately submit a single bid and the winner pays the second-highest losing bid.
In this case, One.com will have paid Radix whatever bid Radix had put forward, with ROTD and escrow partner Escrow.com taking their fees from the winning bid.
Applicant Auction uses an “ascending clock” method, where bids are set in increments by the auctioneer over the space of several rounds, with bidders choosing to stay in or drop out in each round.
Cahn said in a press release: “Our Single Sealed Bid Second Price auction method protects the participants from ‘auction fever,’ which often causes over-bidding as people get emotionally tied to the process of winning at any cost due to time committed and sometimes throw their budgets out the window.”