Well timed picture from the Uniregistry holiday party. pic.twitter.com/lb3lFA6bGN
— Bret Fausett (@bretfausett) December 11, 2016
Uniregistry General Counsel (and talented domain industry attorney) Bret Fausett shared this photo of Frank Schilling at the company’s holiday party. What do you think Frank is saying as he addresses the Uniregistry team following a successful year?
You are welcome to be witty, but please be decent 🙂
Yesterday, I wrote about Uniregistry releasing 3.5 million domain names for people  to register. I am not really much of an investor in the new domain names besides a handful of them, so I did not register any of these domain names.
I know there are people who are investors in the new domain names, and I am curious if anyone was willing to share the names they registered yesterday. I briefly used the search tool that Uniregistry released in conjunction with the news, but I did really use it enough to comment about it.
It would be interesting to see what types of names became available and what types of names readers thought were valuable enough to register. Feel free to share your new registrations below so I (and other readers) can see the types of domain names that were purchased after the names were released.
I just received an email from Uniregistry announcing that they will be “releasing over 3.5 million previously withheld domain names across 19 TLDs.” This will happen in approximately 10 minutes, beginning at 1pm Eastern time today. I believe these domain names will be available at the standard registration and renewal rate, but you will need to check with Uniregistry to confirm as I do not know for certain.
In conjunction with the release of these domain names, the company also launched a search tool to help find domain names amongst the 3.5 million that are being released. Uniregistry announced this to domain industry news outlets, and I also received an email as a Uniregistry client.
I have not yet had a look at the list of domain names that have been released, so I can’t comment on the types of names that will be available to purchase.
Here is the news that was sent to me today:
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:
Uniregistry is promoting its newly launched .Game domain name extension at this week’s E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) conference in Los Angeles, which kicks off today. Circling the event venue will be ten  billboard trucks with .Game advertising on them to help draw awareness to the new .Game domain name extension.
Here’s a photo of 5 of the unlighted trucks that was shared by Uniregistry CEO Frank Schilling yesterday afternoon:
#Uniregistry getting the message out to E3 attendees that there’s a new namespace in town. https://t.co/6wGqImHQbo pic.twitter.com/aarvqxbIMy
— Frank Schilling (@Frank_Schilling) June 13, 2016
According to the
Yesterday I wrote about how I considered buying 50,000 .XYZ domain names for $500 due to the $.01/name offering from Uniregistry. I laid out the pros and cons about registering this huge swath of names, and lots of people shared their valuable and interesting insight.
Shortly after publishing the article, I did a bit of  testing to see if it would even be feasible to do this. I started with the Social Security Administration’s website to get a list of the 1,000 most popular boy and girl baby names for 2015. I created a list of the 2,000 or so names (I am sure there were some duplicates) and appended .XYZ to all of these. When I searched Uniregistry, I encountered a roadblock:
At this point, I probably could have
