I was scrolling my newsfeed today, when Techmeme published a tweet referencing a news story about a new phone from Yandex. Apparently, the company launched a new phone that is called Yandex.Phone. Here’s an excerpt about the new smartphone from the company’s press release:
“Yandex (NASDAQ:YNDX), a technology company that builds intelligent products and services powered by machine learning, has unveiled its first smartphone, Yandex.Phone. “
Here’s the tweet from Techmeme that references Yandex.Phone:
Russian search giant Yandex launches https://t.co/buznx2lIzZ, its first smartphone, with 5.65-inch display, 4GB RAM, Android, and Snapdragon 630 for ~$270 (@psawers / VentureBeat)https://t.co/T2C4Vj2h2Whttps://t.co/1sIjiEXfgm
— Techmeme (@Techmeme) December 5, 2018
As you can see, there are two urls in the tweet, with the first one being Yandex.Phone. It appears that this is an unintentional link that was created because there is a .Phone new gTLD extension, so Yandex.Phone is actually a domain name that becomes a hyperlink within a tweet. Effectively, Techmeme and anyone else who tweets about the new Yandex phone (Yandex.Phone) will pull a “Rudy Giuliani” and unintentionally add a url to their tweet.
At the time of publication, Yandex.Phone is unregistered (see update below). It would be prudent for Yandex to register the domain name and capitalize on this traffic quickly. At the very least, it will prevent a third party from being able to redirect traffic from these tweets. Obviously, it is unwise for a third party to register a domain name with a trademark (like Yandex.Phone), and I would strongly encourage people to not register this domain name.
Update: .Phone domain names are not yet available to register, so Yandex does not have to worry about a third party registering the domain name yet. That being said, there are ISPs that monetize traffic intended for unregistered domain names, so visitors may see PPC links to competitors or be redirected elsewhere, depending on their Internet Service Provider.
.phone doesn’t actually release until late 2019, so it is a dead end
Lucky for them, nobody else can grab it.
That said, some ISPs will still monetize the inadvertent traffic.
They just dont care, like anybody else. Someone has yandex.store listed for sale at Uniregistry (with the obvious desired buyer), but they dont give a rat. Like Adidas wont care about adidas.store being a page with ads. Its just shows how insignificant ngTLDs are, even not worth bothering a corporate lawyer.
And then, it takes at least one aggressive corporate IP guy with the budget to chase them. Yandex has a strong presence in Russia and can monetise there without caring much if they own the domain name or not.