New gTLD

I saw something amusing that Twitter highlighted for me today that I want to share because of its domain name relevance. This has probably gone around before, but I don’t remember hearing anything about it.

If you visit Endless.Horse, which may be the only .horse domain name I have ever visited, you will see a nearly endless horse. If you can scroll to the bottom of the page, you’ll find a surprise.

Here’s a video of someone scrolling to the end of Endless.horse for those without the patience.

pic.twitter.com/1AeuGGhUjf

— NO CONTEXT HUMANS 👤 (@HumansNoContext) October 30, 2023

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: