News about new generic Top Level Domains
Ethos Capital announced Thursday it has completed an investment to acquire a controlling interest of Donuts Inc. from Abry Partners. Based in Seattle, Washington, Donuts holds the world’s largest portfolio of top-level domains with 260 new gTLDs as well as providing registry services for a number of other top-level domains (both gTLDs and ccTLDs) through both its Donuts and Afilias brands.
Total new gTLD registrations have been on a downhill slide since late September 2020 according to nTLDstats.com and the decline is continuing. Verisign’s authorative Domain Name Industry Brief released this week reports that in the final quarter of 2020, new gTLD domain name registrations dropped 4.2 million to 26.0 million which equates to a drop of 13.8% compared to the third quarter of 2020. Over the year new gTLDs decreased by 3.3 million or 11.2%.
ShortDot is launching the Sunrise period for its fourth new gTLD on 10 March, the recently acquired .cfd, which they are promoting as being for #ClothingFashionDesign.
Uni Naming and Registry (or Uniregistry or UNR) is to offload its 23 new generic top-level domains (new gTLDs) in a one-day auction event on 28 April. The event will consist of separate no-reserve auctions for each of the 23 new gTLDs, giving bidders the flexibility to only acquire the Top Level Domains that fit their strategies or budgets.
Less than one month after it was announced Donuts were taking on the domain name registry business of Afilias, Ethos Capital has announced it is taking over Donuts by acquiring a controlling interest in the company.
With ICANN, like many other organisations, forced to move their meetings into the virtual space, there has been a lot of learning about what works, and doesn’t. About what people want. And don’t. So for ICANN69 there was a demand from the community for YouTube streaming, to which ICANN has acquiesced for a limited number of sessions. There have also been protections added to prevent malicious disruptions that have occurred in previous virtual meetings.
.gay domain names became available on a first-come, first-served basis Wednesday with the official launch day and first day of General Availability.
An interesting news observation. As possible antitrust investigations into four of the biggest tech companies are discussed, this week MarketWatch reported how “some big names in videogaming could speed up things” including Fortnite, which they note “is one of the initial conclusions of legal experts and developers following Epic Games Inc.’s lawsuits against Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google for booting Epic’s hit videogame Fortnite out of their app stores Thursday.”
New gTLDs reached an all-time high of 33,736,338 registrations on 8 May, but just two months later on 8 July registrations have dropped 582,873 to 33,153,465 according to statistics from nTLDstats. Registrations amongst the 1,188 new gTLDs that are currently delegated were largely stable from around December 2018 to September 2019, hovering around the 26 million mark. They then grew 7.5 million in the next 8 months until the current slide and today have slipped just below the 33 million mark.
Continue reading Has COVID-19 Wounded New gTLDS As Almost 600,000 Registrations Shed In 2 Months