The silent evolution of domain names
What was once an industry comprised mainly of individual investors and service providers is now attracting corporate money like never before.
Industry giants have hundreds of millions for auctions and infrastructure. Big brands like Amazon, Google, Verisign and WordPress are investing heavily to own and operate entire domain-name extensions. Even company-branded extensions are now going live. Barclay’s is already using home.barclays, and new domain-name extensions for both BMW (.bmw) and Travelers (.trv) have been delegated.
One may even say it’s a natural evolution of media, where brands finally want to own the channel versus renting a space.
[edited by: Webwork at 3:54 pm (utc) on Oct 6, 2016]
One month domainers are all excited about .xyz because G makes a move into the .xyz name space.It was worse than that with .xyz. The registry did a deal with Network Solutions to stuff unwanted xyz domains in the accounts of customers. Most of these domains did not renew but approximately 5% or so did. It was a very cynical ROI move that accepted that the returns on this kind of "offer" were low. But it locked xyz into doing discounting deals with registrars to promote the gTLD. That's the classic boom and bust model where a registry has to keep the new registrations ahead of the dropped registrations. It really went to Hell with the one cent offer. These are the top ten ICANN registrars with new .xyz domains for June 2016.
Several months later .xyz registry holds a $1.00 .xyz domain fire sale and, much like when .info domains were offered for $.99 cents, I start to see .xyz based spam in my inbox.
| Uniregistrar Corp | KY | Cayman Islands | 1,597,894 |
| PDR Ltd. d/b/a PublicDomainRegistry.com | IN | India | 535,016 |
| NameCheap, Inc. | US | United States | 351,181 |
| BigRock Solutions Ltd. | IN | India | 272,819 |
| GMO Internet, Inc. d/b/a Onamae.com | JP | Japan | 235,147 |
| TLD Registrar Solutions Ltd. | GB | United Kingdom | 187,450 |
| Registrar of Domain Names REG.RU LLC | RU | Russian Federation | 94,477 |
| Alibaba Cloud Computing Ltd. d/b/a HiChina (www.net.cn) | CN | China | 75,538 |
| OnlineNIC, Inc. | US | United States | 72,949 |
Total new xyz: 3,633,650
Spamming rarely does a domain "brand" good. Anyone with half a brain can foresee spammers being drawn in by $1.00 pricing. So why go there?From a registry point of view, rather than that of a domainer, it is a volume business.
Is the .xyz registry OR any registry going to play spammer-whack-a-mole in defense of it's brand? Can any registry stop spamming when spammers see $1.00 domains as "burners", one-and-done email blasters?There is a correlation between spam and the price of the new gTLD registration.
What does it tell you about a new gTLD operators "loyalty to the 'brand'" when it offers $1.00 pricing?That they are trying to build registration volume quickly rather than wait for the gradual acceptance and devopment of the gTLD. It is a highly competitive market and awareness of the new gTLDs is nowhwere near that absolute bulls*hit acceptance propaganda from ICANN would suggest.
I see a repeat, on a much larger scale, of the release of .biz, .info, .coop, .travel, etc gTLDs. I see a few players seizing the opportunity of "scaling the model" by bidding to serve as registry for dozens of new gTLDs and then creating a cost effective (profit maximizing) operation by setting up a new gTLD "template" - software, legal docs, management system, etc - then reusing that template for a rinse and repeat operation.Some of the multi-gTLD registry operations have been doing for the last two years or so with varying success. The .coop and .travel really aren't generic gTLDs. They are niche TLDs much like some of the new gTLDs. In a niche TLD, the extension acts as a limiter. The .com initially was a niche TLD, as were .biz and .info but they became genericised. This round of new gTLDs is closed.
One great thing about the premium pricing model: IF a registry can convince a speculative buyer to pay $thousands$ for the "opportunity" to own a keyword+keyword-gTLD domain it guarantees itself a period of high priced renewals . . until the poor domain-land speculator realizes he/she bought swampland, domain real estate that will only go deeper under water as ocean levels - that is, the number of hot new gTLDs - continues to rise.The premium model sucks. It was and is a cash grab. Some of the new gTLDs held back a lot of "premium" domains but the uptake on these domain names has not been good. There have been massive "premium" dumps in recent weeks. The problem with these "premium" domains is that the registry has been applying .com valuation rules to unproven gTLDs. While there are some who may consider a few keywords worth registering, some of the new gTLDs are struggling with less than 10K genuine enduser registrations (registry and registry-linked registrations excluded) and yet there have been sales of domains for tens of thousands of Dollars for some of these domains.
which ones are you seeing failures or successes?Based purely on registration volume and registration fees, there are some that have not covered the ICANN evaluation fee of $185K. New registration volume has collapsed in a few. I've been working on a spreadsheet to integrate all the stats for the gTLDs and it should be finished sometime this afternoon. The problem with thinking of a TLD as a failure is that the registries don't think in this way. While a TLD may not have recovered its initial investment, it may still have a set of domains that continue to renew and that's a viable firesale opportunity for larger companies with deep pockets if the debt overhang can be the subject of a deal. (Actually the .mobi sTLD was taken over and though it is losing registrations, its renewal rates are surprisingly good for such a TLD.)
