NEW YORK, NY - .CLUB Chief Marketing Officer Jeff Sass gave a keynote speech at NamesCon Europe 2018 and did what appeared to be a fantastic job of illustrating, through various different examples, just how bad it is when coming up with your own word (one which has no meaning) when choosing your domain name. Sass accomplished this by showing domain names made up of unknown words on screen and had attendees guess, by multiple choice, what they believed the businesses did that … [Read more...]
Uh Oh: 400,000 Less gTLD Registrations First Quarter of 2018, Vs Previous Quarter
NEW YORK – New gTLD proponents will be less than excited to learn that according to the latest Verisign Domain Name Industry Brief, new gTLD domain registrations, despite there being more awareness :) and more names available for registration, such extensions experienced a decline of 400,000 registrations or loss of 2% within the first Quarter of 2018 (Q1) when compared to the last Quarter of 2017 (Q4). Verisign creates these industry briefs to include quarter-over-quarter … [Read more...]
gTLD Madness: Five Years Later and Where Are We Now? T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Panel Debate
NEW YORK - By the time I started visiting domain conferences in person, unfortunately, what I feel was the greatest domain conference of all time, Howard Neu and Rick Schwartz’s T.R.A.F.F.I.C., had seen its last days. I wish it weren’t so. I think the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. conferences were the best respected domain conferences in history; I can only wish that Howard and Rick, for whatever reason, will team up again and bring it back one day, because everything else, in my opinion, … [Read more...]
Is Dominion Registries Having Trouble Selling Their New Alternative Dots?
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 running … [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...]