One of the top stories on Techmeme this morning is about a new service launched by the French government called Le.Taxi. When I saw the story, my first thought was that I hope they actually used a .Taxi domain name instead of creating a more confusing brand name. After checking, I see that the brand and domain name match, and voila, we have Le.Taxi.
The Techmeme headline referenced an article found on Motherboard. Here’s an excerpt of what was written about Le.Taxi this morning:
It looks like .Shop did very well in its first day of general availability. According to OnlineDomain.com, Domain Name Wire, and DomainIncite.com, over 50,000 .Shop domain names were registered during the first day the domain names were available to be hand registered.
In an unrelated article I published yesterday, John asked if I (or any related entity of mine) registered any .Shop domain names. I did not register any .Shop domain names and I have no plans to buy any. I am sure there are people in the domain space who bought .Shop domain names, but I am not a participant in the new gTLD space, aside from a Donald Trumpesque handful of investments like n.Ventures and n.Holdings.
As I have said like a broken record for a few years dating back to .CO, if I see
Mike Mann has had a successful career in the domain space, and I consider him to be one of the more knowledgeable people in the business of domain names. As a result, when he says something interesting or controversial, people will engage, discuss, and sometimes debate him.
According to DomainIQ, Mike’s company (Domain Asset Holdings, LLC) owns hundreds of thousands of domain names, and the vast majority are .com. He has sold a ton of .com domain names (including the BuyDomains business), and he seems to be of the opinion that nothing compares to .com or competes with it.
In the last few days, Mike posted a couple of provocative tweets about new gTLD domain names. The links within the tweets link to his original comments on Facebook, and this has stirred up some debate on his Facebook page in different threads:
Earlier this week, I learned that a company called X-Formation has launched a new business on Connect.xyz. The business is simply called Connect, and it is a cloud-based task automation application that works with a variety of apps, including Twitter, Salesforce, Slack, and Gmail (among others). I was told that “Connect.xyz serves as a clever marketing tool for this powerful software that excels in integrating with most (X, Y, and Z) applications to extract data.”
X-Formation is a software development company that is used in the field of software licensing. Some of the X-Formation clients listed on the company About Us page include Honda, Siemens, HP, and NASA.
When asked why the company chose Connect.xyz for this website, Henrik Goldman, Founder of X-Formation shared the following:
I’ve been following the comments on Mike Berkens’ article about Frank Schilling’s company deleting over 200k domain names and a discussion thread on NamePros. In that NamePros thread, it looks like many people are ready to declare the new gTLD program dead. In fact, the title of the thread is “New gTLDs are DEAD!! Frank Schilling drops 230,000 new gTLD domains.”
I reached out to Frank Schilling to ask him if he would answer the question “Are new gTLDs dead?” for an article on my blog. Frank was kind enough to answer, which I published below.
In my email to Frank, I shared my interpretation of the news, which is that premium names weren’t selling well, so by letting them drop, Frank was opening up a revenue stream via the registrar channel. Essentially, instead of one of Frank’s companies paying the other (net zero, not including the small ICANN fees), it would make these names available for anyone to register. This would drive revenue for Uniregistry and may get some of these domain names developed by end user buyers, which in my opinion, is essential for the program to have success.
Although I only own a handful of new gTLD domain names, I don’t think the new gTLD program is dead. I don’t really think much has changed besides this model of selling domain names at a premium price. I still most likely won’t be buying the new domain names, but I don’t think it is dead at all.
When I asked Frank the question, I knew he wasn’t going to tell me he thinks it’s dead. However, I thought it would be interesting to read and share his perspective. Here’s what Frank told me:
Yesterday evening on Twitter, .Club CEO and co-founder Colin Campbell made a prediction about the “top” 5 new domain extensions in ten years. Here’s what he posted and what his predictions are:
Prediction: Top 5 new domain extensions: .web .shop .club .app .blog 10 years from now.
— Colin.club (@ColinDotClub) September 17, 2016
When I saw this, I asked him to define “top.” It’s a simple term, but it can have many different meanings and interpretations. Specifically, I asked if he means most registrations, most revenue, or most developed websites. Colin responded to my question today, and he was referring to “Top in Global recognition on par with .tv .co and .org.”
I am glad Colin didn’t mention
