The Boston Globe published an article about its sale of the .Boston domain extension. Minds + Machines acquired the majority of the Boston Globe’s rights to operate the extension for an undisclosed sum. According to the article, the Boston Globe “will retain a small ownership stake in ‘.boston,’ and the company will receive undisclosed future revenues.
Based on my interpretation of the article, it doesn’t seem like The Boston Globe management was too keen on operating .Boston. Here are a couple of outtakes from Hiawatha Bray’s article:
Yesterday morning, the .Club registry shared some statistics about its annual premium sales after capping off a “record” quarter. .Club reported that it closed $2,842,367.27 in “total 2015 premium name sales.” The company also reported that “as of December 31, 2015, total cumulative sales of registry reserved premium .CLUB names came to $3,398,167.27.”
As you may have guessed, the company shared that much of the growth was fueled by domain name purchases from Chinese domain name investors. Overall, “registrations grew by over 240%,” according to the blog post that shared these statistics.
I reached out to .Club CMO Jeff Sass and I asked him for some predictions for 2016. Here are some of his thoughts:
China will continue to be strong.
We’ll get our MIIT approval. The market for names in China will expand from primarily domain investors to include more small businesses, startups and entrepreneurs..
Usage will continue to grow globally. We are always excited to find interesting businesses using .club names like Coffee.club, Soap.club, ManBrands.club, Betting.club and others. Many of these companies create their own marketing and content that features .club which is great for us both. More celebrities and sports figures will get on board with .club fan sites. You can see some examples in our NamesCon Show Video:
According to Whois records at DomainTools, it looks like Apple has registered the Apple.Car domain name. The domain name has a creation date of December 9, 2015, but it appears the company took possession of it just yesterday.
The .Car domain extension is operated in a partnership between the XYZ (Daniel Negari’s company) and Uniregistry (Frank Schilling’s company). The partnership also operates the .Cars and .Auto domain name extensions. It looks like Apple also secured the Apple.Cars and Apple.Auto domain names as well.
As of right now, Apple.Car, Apple.Cars, and Apple.Auto
The new gTLD domain name program continues to be one of the most polarizing topics in the domain space. It seems that there are passionate people who feel strongly for or against the new gTLD domain names.
There are now over 11 million registered new gTLD domain names. I would imagine that many of these domain names are owned by domain speculators / investors. As we close out the year, I thought I would ask if you bought and still own any new gTLD domain names.
I believe my companies own fewer than 10 new gTLD domain names. I own n.ventures, n.holdings, Silver.Ventures, Elliot.Link, ElliotSilver.Link, TeamSilver.Rocks, and maybe a couple of others I can’t think of off the top of my head.
I understand why some companies would want to own and use new gTLD domain names. I have seen
According to nTLDStats.com, there are now more than 11 million registered new gTLD domain names. I am not sure if the 11 million mark was passed today or yesterday, but it currently stands at 11,062,149 registered domain names.
On November 18, I reported that the 10 million new gTLD domain name registration milestone had been reached. The 9 million registration milestone had been reached just a couple of weeks prior to that on November 4th. Between 10 million and 11 million registrations, over a month passed. I am not sure if this means that the velocity of new registrations slowed, deletions of previously registered domain names increased, or if there was a combination of factors.
It does not look like much has changed in terms of the most registered new gTLD domain names. Here are the 5 most registered extensions as of today (according to nTLDStats.com):
According to multiple tweets yesterday, the 9.XYZ domain name sold on West.cn for 1135000 RMB. At today’s conversion rate of Chinese Yuan to US Dollars, the sale is approximately $175,000. Since the auction just ended, I do not believe the deal is officially closed yet, so keep an eye on the Whois change if you want to confirm.
This is the second notable public single number .XYZ sale, with 6.XYZ having sold in a private transaction for $125,000 in November. When 6.XYZ sold for $125,000, .XYZ registry CEO Daniel Negari told me that single number .XYZ domain names are going to be priced much higher going forward. Specifically, Daniel told me the company is “considering offers of $250K+ for the remaining numbers individually.” I asked Daniel why 9.XYZ sold for less than this figure, and he told me that this domain name was put into the no reserve auction prior to when he made the comments to me.
