Yesterday afternoon, Thornton McEnery of Crain’s New York published an article about .NYC domain names: What’s he smoking? Podiatrist foots $60K bill for marijuana.nyc. The article covered the recently concluded auctions for .NYC domain names, which grossed just under $750,000 in total sales, netting “roughly $300,000” for the government of New York City.
McEnery published a list of 1,011 domain names that went to auction. Nearly half of these domain names sold for $10, and the largest sale was Marijuana.NYC at $60,920. I don’t know if the sale price included an additional registration fee or not (for instance if a buyer who won an auction for $10 only had to pay $10 or a registration fee on top).
I took the .NYC list that was published and ran all the domain names through GoDaddy’s bulk domain checker as .com domain names to see how many of these names were unregistered in .com (MarijuanaNYC.com for example). Out of the 1,011 .NYC domain names sold at auction, I saw that 301 are available to register in .com. My advice would be for the owners to grab the matching .com if they intend to develop their .NYC domain names. They might as well control both to avoid confusion, especially given the low cost.
To date, there have been 67,815 .NYC domain names sold, according to nTLDStats.com. With these registration numbers, .NYC currently ranks #8 in the list of top new gTLD domain extensions sold. The only other geographic domain extension outperforming .NYC is .Berlin, which had a free domain name event that boosted its registration numbers.
If I still lived in New York City, I would have been a buyer of .NYC domain names. It would be interesting to see how local businesses and entrepreneurs use their domain names.
One thing we can all observe from a distance is whether this Crain’s article has an impact on registration numbers for .NYC. Crain’s has considerable reach, especially in the financial and real estate sectors, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see a spike in registrations in the coming days.
To answer your question here: “I don’t know if the sale price included an additional registration fee or not (for instance if a buyer who won an auction for $10 only had to pay $10 or a registration fee on top).”
In order to participate in these auctions, you had to have placed a ‘priority’ order for the specific name involved. These orders cost between $65 and $90 depending on the Registrar you bought from. This fee includes the first year of registration.
The $10 bid is on top of whatever the person would have paid for their Priority order. So if you paid $90 for the Priority order and won the auction for $10, your total cost was $100, including one year of registration.
Thank you for sharing that info!
Hey Eliot.
Ya, i picked up only one name for 10$ (aka 100). Out of 50 or so that went to auction for me, and 90 total. For the rest i had some big battles. Some i got good deals on, but most went for decent chunk of change.
A lot dependent who you got in your bidding bracket, some names that i though worth a lot more, i got for much less then i expected. On the other hand, some names i paid a good whole sale value, and then few names i really wanted, i got at the top of the whole sale value.
Also i felt that first stage (of 3 stages) was easiest, after that bidding got more fierce. The third stage was also relatively relaxed, since a lot of big bidders started to run low on cash.
All in all, this just shows how much .nyc is good with media. This small news already had 4 news sources pick it up after Crains.
I cant wait for the premium reserved names to start hitting auctions, i think media going to be covering it a lot.
I’m not surprised that Crain’s was watching the auction. Obviously quite relevant to their general New York coverage. They’ve also been a participant in the new gTLD releases having acquired Detroit.business, Chicago.business, and Cleveland.business since they have publishing operations catered to those cities as well.