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.

XYZ scraps .tickets rules but won’t lower the price

XYZ.com has just formally announced the acquisition of the new gTLD .tickets, which we reported on in April.

The company said it plans to keep the domains at the current high price of $500 retail per year, in contrast to its recent practice of dropping its fees on some of its recent acquisitions.

But it is going to remove “complicated registration restrictions” and make .tickets names available according to the rules for gTLDs in the rest of its portfolio, which should broaden its channel appeal.

The company argues that, in the absence of stringent registration rules, the high prices make it “cost prohibitive” for bad actors to cybersquat.

.tickets was being managed by original applicant Accent Media until earlier this year.

XYZ adds .tickets to its gTLD stable

XYZ.com has taken over the ICANN registry agreement for the gTLD .tickets, according to records.

It looks to be the registry’s 23rd TLD, the latest of XYZ’s acquisitions of unused or floundering new gTLDs.

In the case of .tickets, it’s picking up a low-volume, high-price TLD with some rather onerous registration restrictions.

The TLD was originally set up by UK-based Accent Media to provide a space where people going to music, theater and sporting events, for examples, could buy tickets in the assurance that the sellers were legit.

Would-be .tickets registrants have a five-day waiting period before their domains go live, while the registry manually verifies their identities from paper records such as passports or driving licenses.

That high-friction reg process is one reason the shelf price for a .tickets domain is well over $500 a year.

It’s also a reason why very few .tickets domains have been sold. The registry peaked at fewer than 1,200 names in its zone file in 2018 and has been on the decline ever since.

It had 769 names in its zone at the end of March this year.

Registry reports show that the majority of its names are registered via brand-protection registrars and are likely unused. Searches for active .tickets sites return fewer than 100 results.

XYZ might be able to turn this around by smoothing out the reg friction and lowering the price.

But even just 1,000 names at $500 a year could be considered a nice little earner as part of a portfolio with low overheads from economies of scale. XYZ already runs even higher-priced, lower-volume zones such as .cars and .auto.

Does .tickets have the ultimate anti-cybersquatting system?

I’ve never seen anything like this before.
.tickets gTLD registry Accent Media has launched an anti-cybersquatting measure that lets the world know who is trying to register what domain name a whole month before the domain is allowed to go live.
The service, at domains.watch, is currently only being used by .tickets, but it seems to be geared up to accept other TLDs too.
A spokesperson said the site soft-launched a couple months ago.
Today, if you want to register a .tickets domain name, you have a choice of two processes — “fast-track” or “standard”.
Fast-track is for organizations with trademarks matching their names. It take five days for the trademark to be verified and the domain to go live.
Standard-track applications, however, are published on domains.watch for 30 days before the the registration is fully processed (under the registry hood, the domain are kept in “Pending Create” status).

During that 30 days, anyone with a trademark they believe would be infringed by the domain may file a challenge against the registration. They have to pay a fee to do so.
The would-be registrant can counter by showing their own rights. If they have no documented rights, the challenger gets the name instead.
“Rights” in the case of .tickets means a trademark or evidence of use of a mark in a ticketing-related context.
While it’s certainly not unusual in the industry for restricted TLDs to manually vet their registrants before processing a registration, I’ve never before come across a registry that does it all in public, allowing basically anyone — or, at least, anyone who is willing to pay the challenge fee — to challenge any registration.
Can you imagine what the domain world would be like if this kind of system were commonplace across a range of TLDs?
A lot of people outside the industry — particularly in security, I fancy — would love it.

Accent wins .tickets auction after $1.6m CentralNic investment

Accent Media, one of four applicants for .tickets, has won the new gTLD at auction after receiving a $1.62 million investment from CentralNic.
As part of the deal, Accent has dumped Afilias as its back-end provider and will switch to CentralNic instead.
Competing applicants Donuts, Famous Four Media, Shubert Internet and Tickets TLD are now expected to pull their applications, though none appear to have had their withdrawals accepted by ICANN yet.
It’s not clear how much .tickets sold for.
CentralNic acquired a 12% stake in Accent in exchange for its investment. Both companies are based in the UK.
The deal is believed to be unrelated to the $1.5 million investment in a gTLD applicant that CentralNic announced — with the proceeds earmarked for auction — last week.
Accent has applied for a quite restricted TLD, with anti-fraud measures at its heart. Its authenticated registration process is described as being a bit like the process of buying an SSL certificate.
CentralNic CEO Ben Crawford said in a statement:

The “.tickets” Top-Level Domain will be a compelling new tool to assist consumers to easily identify legitimate and trusted ticket sales sites, as well as empowering venues, entertainers and sports organizations to improve their use of the internet for enabling fans to purchase tickets. This investment realizes our strategy of investing in Top-Level Domain applicants as well as operating as a business partner to their operators.