New gTLD

Lease to Own deals have become quite popular at Dan.com. The buyer can pay for a domain name monthly over a set period of time while Dan.com holds the domain name. If the buyer opts out of the LTO deal, the seller will receive the domain name back and can keep all of the funds paid, minus the monthly commission fee.

Domain Gang and DNW recently reported on the $129k LTO sale of Mega.xyz. As Theo reported, the five year lease to own plan had a total value of $167,000 had all payments been made. When the LTO deal was struck, the seller, domain industry veteran Kellie Peterson, posted on LinkedIn about this LTO deal and prior experience with .XYZ domain names.

Yesterday afternoon, I saw a tweet from Domainler.com asking if the sale had been cancelled because Mega.xyz was now resolving to a Dan.com “for sale” landing page:

Mr. Beast is one of the most popular YouTube personalities. In fact, I’m probably not in his target audience, but I find myself watching his viral videos from time to time. My kids and their friends also love watching Mr. Beast.

Mr. Beast’s newest video on YouTube caught my attention because of an in-video advertorial related to domain names. Mr. Beast switched the domain name extension for his merchandise shop from a .com domain name to a .store domain name. Mr. Beast’s store moved from ShopMrBeast.com to MrBeast.Store.

In looking at the historical Whois records at DomainTools, I can see the same company that owns ShopMrBeast.com has owned MrBeast.Store since at least 2019. The domain name was created in 2017, but it was registered under Whois privacy until 2019.

In the description section of the video, it is clear this is a promotion. It says, “Go buy my merch at https://mrbeast.store and if you’re looking to set up an online store, it should be on a .Store domain. Thanks for sponsoring this video!” I assume this is a paid promotion from Radix, the operator of the .Store domain registry. Not only does it seem like a solid ad buy from the registry, but I am sure Mr. Beast’s domain extension change will bring quite a bit of exposure to .Store domain names.

The video is embedded below, starting at the point he discusses the domain name change:

Amazon has registered four new .Amazon domain names, according to a Registrant Monitor alert email I received from DomainTools this morning. The four domain names Amazon registered are:

• My.Amazon
• Home.Amazon
• Go.Amazon
• www.Amazon

These four domain names were registered at Com Laude, a corporate domain name registrar. None of these domain names resolve to active websites or forward to pages within the Amazon.com website as of the time of publication.

Nike announced the launch of a new digital web3 community called .SWOOSH. The announcement was made on Nike’s corporate blog. Interestingly to those who are in the domain name space, the company is using a domain name from its .Nike branded TLD to host the website: Swoosh.Nike. Unlike .Swoosh, .Nike is an extension that can be reached on all web browsers.

I think it could be a bit confusing to operate a platform called .Swoosh on a .Nike domain name. In the blog post announcing the launch, Nike specifically mentioned the safety of using its own domain extension for the platform:

Identity Digital is the registry management company that had been known as Donuts until its’ rebrand in June. This afternoon, the company shared a video on social media promoting alternative extensions to .com. “Don’t stop at the dot,” is the call to action in the video found in the tweet below:

Check out the new Identity Digital video: pic.twitter.com/1cGY6F9WdA

— Identity Digital Inc (@IdentityDig) August 1, 2022

I think the most effective type of marketing like this would be targeting domain name buyers near the point of purchase. I am curious to know if Identity Digital is able to market at the point of sale at registrars like GoDaddy, Namecheap, Tucows, Google…etc. I am also curious to know if the company is using this campaign beyond social media.

If I see any additional campaigns like this, I will share.