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Some people paid premiums for .hot domain hacks
Amazon Registry’s launch of three gTLDs last week saw some registrants pay premium prices for .hot domain hacks.
Zone file data shows domains such as moons.hot and slings.hot were registered towards to the end of the five-day Early Access Period, with the registrant likely paying close to a thousand bucks for each.
cums.hot, longs.hot, moneys.hot, mugs.hot, pots.hot and ups.hot have all been registered, seeming by a broad range of registrants, at regular general availability prices since EAP closed May 17.
The EAP was lightly subscribed, if the zones are a guide. There were a handful of defensive registrations towards the end of the week, along with a few context-appropriate keywords like piping.hot.
.hot launched at the same time as .free and .spot, which don’t seem to have the same domain hack opportunities. Most EAP regs there were either defensives or keywords. Names like speak.free and live.free were registered.
As of today, .free is doing the best of the three, with 931 names in its zone, followed by .spot with 373 and .hot with 309.
.hot is for hookers? Amazon’s first premium regs revealed
Amazon Registry made three new gTLDs available to non-trademark-holders on Monday, and so far a handful registrants have taken up the offer of premium Early Access Period pricing.
The five-day EAPs for .free, .hot and .spot see prices start high and decrease each day until May 17, when they’ll settle at standard general availability pricing.
While the wholesale prices have not been published by Amazon, the registrar 101domain was retailing them for $6,299 on day one, $3,299 on day two, $1,399 on day three, $799 on day four, and $199 on day five.
GA pricing for .hot at 101domain will be $59.99, while .free will be $44.99 and .spot will be $29.99.
The early adopter(s) in .hot seem to be viewing it as a sex-related TLD along the lines of .xxx, .sex or .sexy. All the day-one registrations (in multiple languages) look set to be used for escort services.
The domains that popped up for the first time in the May 13 zone files were:
be.free
bible.free
sql.freeacompanhantes.hot
escort.hot
escorts.hot
incontri.hot
prepagos.hot
trans.hothigh.spot
hub.spot
The only new domain in the May 14 zones appears to be live.free. They’re not exactly flying off the shelves so far.
Because the zone files are generated at midnight UTC and Amazon’s EAP daily price-increase cut-off is 1259 UTC, it’s not possible to say for sure how much each registrant paid for their domain names.
.free domains to finally arrive as Amazon reveals three gTLD launches
Amazon Registry has revealed launch dates for three of its long-dormant gTLDs, and they have the potential to be the most popular of its patchy portfolio.
.free, .hot and .spot are to go to sunrise April 2, according to a notice on Amazon’s web site and paperwork filed with ICANN.
The Trademark Claims period, which pretty much always coincides with the start of general availability, is set for May 12.
Details of pricing and any possible registration restrictions have not been published.
All three gTLDs have been in the root since 2016, just sitting there doing nothing. Amazon has 54 gTLDs in total, 10 of which are dot-brands, but most of the generics remain stubbornly unlaunched.
Its half-dozen Japanese-script domains have been around the longest, but its biggest success to date has been .bot, which has about 14,000 names in its zone file.
Amazon launched .deal and .now last year but the former has yet to hit 10,000 names and the former still hasn’t hit 1,000.
Amazon had to pay off four other applicants for the right to run .free.
gTLD auctions net ICANN another $13m
ICANN has raised another $12.9 million from new gTLD auctions.
A small batch of three contention sets — .realty, .salon and .spot — were resolved last Wednesday in the third so-called “last resort” auction.
.realty went to Fegistry for $5,588,888, .salon to Donuts for $5,100,575 and .spot to Amazon for $2.2 million.
ICANN now has accumulated new gTLD auction sales totaling $27.8 million.
It raised $14.3 million selling off .buy, .tech and .vip in September. The auction for .信息 fetched $600,000 in June.
ICANN’s share — after auctioneer Power Auctions is paid off — is being put into a special fund, rather that ICANN’s current account. The community will one day have to decide what to spend it on.
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