NEW YORK - According to a press release by Dominion Registries, a division of Dominion Enterprises, the company is removing a long list of previously implemented registrant eligibility verification restrictions for its new gTLD industry-specific domain extensions which consist of .AUTOS, .BOATS, .HOMES, .MOTORCYCLES and .YACHTS. The changes will be made this year, beginning first with .BOATS, which is now available to anyone at all, for just about any reason, defined … [Read more...]
CBS News Offers Readers ‘Bad Advice’ in 6 Best Practices for Choosing a Domain
NEW YORK, NY – Usually when you read an article in Google News, you expect it to give you some good advice, especially when it is a reputable news website. That’s not what happened today when Google News led me to question whether or not I was even on a real news website. Rather than focusing so much on cleaning up Facebook and Twitter, maybe Google should check their own inclusion practices. The article is on CBS News Detroit and it is called “6 Best Practices for Choosing … [Read more...]
From the Floor: Premium .COM ‘Dreamers’ May Find Reality of Ownership, Closer
NEW YORK, NY – If ever you considered getting that “big name” in a .com extension, there may never be a better time than right now. The domain auctions are, for the most part, a ‘wholesale market’, so most people expect auction prices to be, well - better than average. However, most would not expect the “super-great” deals we all saw at NamesCon this year (2018), which were potentially better than any year past. And talk about “Great”... its .com version (Great.com) sold for … [Read more...]
Update: Top 100 .Net Domain Sales So Far This Year (01/02/2017 – 09/09/2017)
NEW YORK, NY - Earlier this year I gathered a list of top sales from NameBio for the .net extension. This list requires an update as Uniregistry released sales numbers which contain some very impressive sales for short.net domains (NameBio added the entire list to its database yesterday). Listed below is an updated record of .net domain names which have been reported publicly and have closed this year reflecting $1,068,769.00 in sales. I've been watching single word .net … [Read more...]
US Fortune 500 Businesses, Their Domain Name Characteristics, and Secure Status
NEW YORK, NY - Each year Fortune Magazine publishes a list of the largest companies in the United States by revenue. Below is the list for 2016. Also below, are some interesting characteristics of their domain name choices including whether or not these companies are prepared for SSLs on their corporate websites. 494 are using .com domain names, 4 use .nets, 1 .org, and 1 .xyz. 494 (98.8%) have chosen the ".com" extension for their domain name. 235 (47%) are … [Read more...]
What Do You See Here? Top 10 Legacy Domain Name Sales Over Last Few Years
NEW YORK, NY - Thanks to sites such as Namebio, we can examine REPORTED domain name sales over the years in just about any order or scenario. Today I wanted to look at the top 10 domain name sales over the last few years for legacy and some popular domain extensions. They are listed here twice; once accounting for only characters in the domain and then again for those including numeric and dashes. There has been some changes in the investments from foreign countries such as … [Read more...]
Forget That: Bing Wants Users to Ignore Ending .Com Domain Extensions
NEW YORK, NY –They say that actions speak louder than words. This holds true with Microsoft’s Bing.com search engine, the second most popular search engine service, which has implemented an interesting change new gTLD lovers may be pleased about; they’ve removed the right-of-the-dot extension in search results for all .com domain names. So what is the subconscious message here? Performing a search on the BING.com search engine this morning, here, New York Eastern Time … [Read more...]
Corporate Giant with New gTLD Explains What, How and Why It Chose New Domain
NEW YORK, NY - Canon Inc., a multinational corporation headquartered in Japan, is one of hundreds of global corporations which have applied to operate their very own domain extension on the Internet. These new web addresses, specifically, this one, .cannon, will serve as one of potentially several official sites for the Corporation for ensuring users are on the actual Cannon site as it is an internet address only Cannon will be permitted to use. Other more common addresses … [Read more...]
Is There a Limit to Your gTLD Stupidity Meter? At $185k a-Pop, Who Cares Right?
NEW YORK, NY - There are a lot of cool looking domain name extensions hitting the market and making the rounds these days – so many in fact it is getting hard to keep up with them all. I mostly like the short ones which at least somewhat represent the Internet such as “.web”, “.site”, “.link”, etc. But who in their right mind would want to register and own a .motorcycles domain name? Could it be any longer? I mean, nine times out of ten the beginning word (what's left of the … [Read more...]
Making Their Mark: “Big Brands” Invest Hundreds of Millions on .Dot Alternatives
NEW YORK, NY - Regardless of what your position is on new gTLD domains "Big Brands" are buying in hook, line and sinker while ICANN is raking in hundreds of millions of dollars on new gTLD fees. Each new application cost its applicant $185,000.00 and with it, an annual maintenance fee of $24,000.00 (yearly recurring). This doesn't include potentially hundreds of generic domains that were applied for and went to auction (I didn't count each one [Full statistics here] … [Read more...]
New gTLD Success Will Be Measured Only by Use; Not Sales, Not Registrations
NEW YORK, NY - This week a new gTLD sale made the news, not because of its great keyword, but due to its high price and its ending extension. The domain name casino.online recently sold for over $200,000.00 at SEDO. This might seem like a domainers dream-sale turning a lucky registrant into an instant success, but it was far from a general availability registration; it was actually a domain name reserved by the registry. So basically, it was, for the most part, a planned … [Read more...]
Just 2% of Top 100 Highest Priced .xyz Domains In Use for Bonafide Services
NEW YORK, NY - According to nTLDStats.com, a data provider offering statistics for new gTLDs, the .xyz domain has the highest number of registrations out of all new gtld domains available. Looking at the highest value sold .xyz domains in all reported aftermarket sales, 98% of them are not developed or show any signs by their owners for development in the future. Out of the 100 domains checked, just two (2) of them are developed with one (1), spring.xyz, looking like it … [Read more...]
Schilling Comes Clean on Domain Hike; “Understands Price Increases Unpopular”
The world is in an uproar at the moment – the domain world that is. New gTLD domain names, those under the Uniregistry umbrella (which is a lot of them), will experience “significant” price hikes in the coming years, some of which could be up to 300% higher than originally released at. The domain community is not happy. There are many good reasons why people are in an uproar; for one, you have domain investors who may have purchased large numbers of these domains; second, … [Read more...]
Sedo.com Weekly Domain Name Sales List 02/27/2017 – 03/06/2017
Just released is Sedo's weekly sales list, a weekly list of public transactions above $2,000. This weeks highlights included the top .com sold as elektromobil.com at $14,000 EUR (14,793.00 US), the top ccTLD as ich.de at 10,100 EUR ($10,673.00 US) and the top “other” TLD as fly.info at 10,000 EUR ($10,567.00 US). Here is the entire list from Sedo sales from 02/27/2017 – 03/06/2017. Domain … [Read more...]
Verisign Still Pushing Hard on .Net Domains; Sales Remain Active; New IDN for Korea
NEW YORK, NY - While at NamesCon, I noticed a television commercial for the .net domain extension pushing it as a leading “trusted extension” and touting its long standing history in the domain space; the .net domain name was created on the same day as the .com in January 1985. (I’m pretty sure the video was part of Verisign’s “Uncommonly Timeless” collection of .net marketing pieces - it looked like one of these on YouTube [one is below].) According to Verisign, the … [Read more...]
Nice to Hear: Dot Info Domain Extension Used in Radio Commercial by University
I heard one of my first radio commercials today to use a “.info” domain name for its website address. The commercial was about “Brain Imaging” research and was running on behalf of Stony Brook University Hospital and Yale University for their Department of Psychiatry using the domain name Imagers.info to promote Opportunities to Participate in Research. I’ve always liked .info domain names very much when it comes to either “getting information” about something or … [Read more...]
Measuring New gTLD Growth and Market Share via The DNS Zone File System
NEW YORK, NY - As should be no surprise, new gTLD growth and usage is on the rise exponentially. There are several tools available for measuring gTLD growth and market share which are ‘fairly accurate’ as they use the DNS Zone File system which maps domain names and IP addresses. One such tool which I originally thought was new is ntldstats.com, although the owner Stefan Meinecke was interviewed back in 2014 by TheDomains.com - so it is far from … [Read more...]