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.
The XYZ Registry recently launched Sunrise periods for five recently acquired new gTLDs – .quest and four new gTLDs for the beauty industry – .Beauty, .Hair, .Skin and .Makeup. Registrations for trademark holders commenced 1 December while General Availability will commence on 2 March.
The .gay new gTLD has announced they have given a $90,000 donation to LGBTQ non-profits, coinciding with global #GivingTuesday celebrations this week, bringing the total amount raised from new .gay domain registrations so far to $124,440 since .gay’s launch earlier this year.
The third quarter of 2020 closed with 370.7 million domain name registrations across all top-level domains (TLDs), an increase of 0.6 million registrations, or 0.2 percent, for the quarter, according to Verisign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief released this week. This compares to growth of 0.9 percent for the second and 1.2 percent for the first quarter of 2020. Over the 12 months to the end of September, registrations have grown by 10.8 million, or 3.0 percent.
Donuts dropped a bit of a bombshell on the domain name industry Thursday by announcing they were taking on the domain name registry business of Afilias, making it one of the largest providers of backend registry services for hundreds of ccTLDs, legacy gTLDs and new gTLDs.
.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.”
The FBI has reported this week it was seeing an increasing number of consumers not receiving items purchased from websites, according to complaints they have received. The websites are offering low prices on items such as gym equipment, small appliances, tools and furniture. And the FBI has found domain names being used are not .com, but rather the fraudulent websites are using new gTLDs like .club and .top.
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