Last night, ICANN broke the news that 11 domain extensions that were operated and sold by UNR have been reassigned upon approval from ICANN. The .HipHop extension was reassigned to Dot Hip Hop LLC (a company started by Monte Cahn and Jeff Neuman), and ten extensions were assigned to XYZ.COM LLC, the company operating .XYZ and many other extensions.
The ten extensions that were acquired by and assigned to XYZ are: .Audio, .Christmas, .Diet, .Flowers, .Game, .Guitars, .Hosting, .LOL, .Mom, and .Pics. Including these ten extensions and its flagship .XYZ extension, XYZ now operates 33 domain name extensions.
Following the ICANN blog post, XYZ issued a press release announcing the assignment and published a blog post with additional commentary about the acquisitions.
Because these extensions are already in the market and available for people to purchase and use, I was curious about what .XYZ plans to do differently than UNR to make these extensions successful. I posed that question to XYZ CEO Daniel Negari, and here’s what I was told:
“XYZ’s marketing and distribution strategies are proven. We have rebranded these ten TLDs with a new look and voice to target not only the obvious audiences but any creative user. Down the line, we will be applying our own strategy to pricing as well as releasing reserved inventory to the public in the spirit of openness and inclusion.
We already began marketing middle of last year, for an apples to apples comparison the TLDs revenues for the first 79 days of 2021 compared to 2022 resulted in a 50%+ increase in revenue and we are excited to begin releasing our new branding and marketing materials!
Check them out at https://nic.game, https://nic.lol and read our blog https://gen.xyz/blog/xyzgotgame
As we gain control over these generational namespaces you can expect to see XYZ’s full marketing power to raise awareness and expand access to our 200+ registrars & retailers around the world.”
