Impossible to Appraise New gTLD Domain Names

Elliot Silver
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Someone sent me a LinkedIn message this afternoon asking me to appraise some “premium” new gTLD domain names. I told him “no” because I am not really active in that part of the market. It is difficult enough to give a meaningful (accurate) appraisal of a .com domain name, but I think it is pretty much impossible to appraise new gTLD domain names with any level of certainty.

If an appraisal can’t be at least somewhat accurate, it doesn’t make sense to even try. I want to share some of the reasons for why I think it would be impossible to give an appraisal of new domain extensions:

There is a lack of public sales reported. Yes, there have been some publicly

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.Club Sells Startup.Club Domain Name

Elliot Silver
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startup.clubThe .Club Registry launched Startup.Club as a means of selling some of their best .Club domain names while lending support to businesses who use those domain names. Among some of the entities that were established with the help of the Startup.Club network are Coffee.Club and Soap.Club.

According to an email from .Club CMO Jeff Sass, the registry has sold the Startup.Club domain name for $22,500. This sale was noted in a Registry blog post that shared the company’s March sales report. Jeff told me that the concept of Startup.Club will continue, but it will be moved due to the sale. “We’ll continue our “Startup Club” program but move the content to our main website,” he said.

In March, the .Club Registry sold 63 premium names, including 56 names that were sold through its registrar channel. I presume this means that 7 .Club domain names were sold directly via the registry. The total premium domain sales for the month were

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.XYZ Auction Results With “Confirmed Payments”

Elliot Silver
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A few days ago as the West.cn .XYZ auctions were concluding, I reached out to the .XYZ Registry team to ask if they could share the results once the auctions close. Shayan Rostam, Global Director of Registry Operations at the .XYZ Registry, emailed me this evening to share that the registry “officially announced the results of the auction last night based on confirmed payments.”

The largest reported sale of the auction was 1.XYZ, which sold for $182,922 USD. 66.XYZ was the second largest sale at $65,315 USD, and the third largest sale was 51.XYZ, which sold for $46,327 USD. YM.XYZ was the highest grossing letter domain name, and that sold for $39,563.

Based on the “confirmed payments” part of his quote, I presume this means the sales have been transacted and payments have been received by the auction house and remitted to the registry (or owners of the domain names that sold if not the registry). In total,

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Masters Winner Uses .Golf Domain Name

Elliot Silver
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If you’re a fan of golf, you probably spent at least some time the last few days watching the 2016 Masters golf tournament in Augusta, Georgia. If you watched the last few holes during the final round on Sunday, you saw Danny Willett win the Masters.

Interestingly, Danny Willett uses a .Golf domain name for his professional website: DannyWillett.golf. I first learned about this after seeing Donuts Co-Founder and EVP Dan Schindler’s tweet following Willett’s victory (Donuts operates the .Golf extension):

If you have a look at Willett’s Twitter page, you can see him link to DannyWillett.golf, which confirms that this is his official domain name. Whois registration information shows that the domain name is registered to International Sports Management Ltd., which is “a sports management agency based in Cheshire, England that represents leading figures from the sports of golf and cricket.” Interestingly, the company uses ISM.golf for its website.

I asked Dan  Schindler  if there is any marketing deal between Donuts and Willett, and he said

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.Store in Sunrise

Elliot Silver
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Radix announced that the .Store domain extension is now in its Sunrise stage. This is the period of time where trademark holders can acquire .Store domain names that match their brands and marks. Considering the number of .com domain names that have “Store” in them, I would imagine this is going to be a relatively popular extension.

To help make trademark owners aware of the sunrise period, the registry created an informational video sharing what the Sunrise period means and how trademark owners can reserve their domain names. I think it’s a good idea to make trademark owners aware of the sunrise period to reduce the number of cybersquatting instances, which don’t benefit anyone.

According to Radix, “On Day 1 of Sunrise itself, .store garnered 150+ requests from brands ranging across product categories like gameofthrones, chopard, nike, walmart, nivea, apple, google etc.” This is a start, but hopefully there will be many more brands reserving their trademark domain names. It’s crappy that brands have to goto great lengths to protect themselves by buying domain names, but early reservations during the Sunrise period will likely cost less than trademark enforcement once the general public can register any available domain names.

 

Here’s the Radix press release with more information about .Store sunrise period:

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Negotiate With the Registry

Elliot Silver
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Earlier this week, Rightside announced a promotion for new gTLD domain names from the company’s portfolio that it has designated as premium. The gist of the offer is that “when customers register an eligible Premium domain from participating partners at the regular premium price, the wholesale cost to registrars for renewing the domain will be $10.”

This offer is interesting, but something else in the blog post got my attention. The special offer excludes domain names the company has designated as “Platinum-level premium domains,” but the company shared some insight about those domain names that should be useful to people interested in buying the new gTLD domain names: “Rightside is always open to negotiating Platinum pricing.”

There are almost always

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