OnlineDomain.com Domain Name News & Opinions
Yesterday was the launch day of the .sexy and .tattoo. The first 2 New gTLDs launched by Frank Schilling’s Uniregistry. Here are some interesting facts:
Sunrise
Sunrise was pretty slow. Especially in .tattoo that only got 24 registrations. That was the worst performing new gTLD. The worst of the first 25 Donuts new gTLDs was .land with only 40 sunrise registrations.
.tattoo 24 registrations
.sexy 144 registrations
Problems
As Frank himself said Uniregistry had some problems with the launch of it’s first 2 new gTLDs. I believe Frank was referring to the pre-registrations not working or some miscommunication with the registrars but that is not truly the problem. The problem is that the whois does not recognize which domain names are available or not and that Frank has reserved thousands of the best domains leaving pretty much nothing for people to register. Frank can reserve what ever he wants but in conjunction with the whois problem this whole mess wasted a lot of people’s time. Also a lot of money is still tied up in pre-registrations that didn’t worked for domains that were never available with refunds pending. Check here my post from yesterday with all these problems. The post has over 60 comments.
Registrations
The registrations from the first few hours were also pretty slow. .Tattoo did a lot worse than what I expected compared with .sexy. I know sexy is a more popular term but there a lot of professionals in the tattoo business. Sexy is more of a novelty term so the renewal rate for .sexy should be low next year. .Tattoo was again the worst performing new gTLD at about 11 hours into general availability. Donuts did have a 7 day EAP preceding the real general availability but that 7 day period had pretty low numbers. Te bulk registrations of the 25 Donuts new gTLDs were done with pre-registrations and registrations in the first few hours of general availability.
Of course these numbers were affected by 2 things:
1) Go Daddy that had about 45% of New gTLD registrations was not selling these 2 new GTLDs.
2) Most of the good keywords are reserved.
So .tattoo had about 600 (if you take out the ~100 Uniregistry registrations) registrations after the first few hours compared with 1099 for .plumbing at the same time. .Guru had 12435 registrations at that time. .Sexy did better than .ventures (1685) and worse than .singles (2083).
.tattoo 677 total registrations in zone file
.sexy 1985 total registrations in zone file
Registrars
These are the top 3 registrars for .tattoo:
Enom 172
Name.com 160
101domain 91
These are the top 3 registrars for .sexy:
Name.com 683
Enom 363
101Domain 190
Reserved Domain Names
Frank said that Uniregistry has reserved thousands of domain names. It is unclear what will happen to these domains. Are these going to be sold individually like ICM Registry, the .xxx registry does, or are these going to be offered in auction in batches? Or something else…
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Maybe he had to say that previuosly. Knowing that THOUSANDS of premium domains would have been unavailable nobody would have losen his time…
Saying this after general availability bring to bad thoughts…even thoughts about “front running” by the register
Not to mention many of the good domains went to Franks sales team… Example: danis.sexy
https://whois.uniregistry.net/whois
I did notice that but they used a registrar after GA.
Knowing Frank’s modus operandi, this was only a test drive. Lessons are learned from things that go not so smoothly. I used 101Domain.com for my successful registrations.
With Uniregistry rolling out its own registrar, these issues are definitely going to be addressed.
There has been zero promotion of gTLDs across the board and I expect this to change shortly. There are other things coming up that I am not in a position to share.
That being said, diversification in domain investing is the only strategy that will work without breaking one’s domain ‘bank’.
“There are other things coming up that I am not in a position to share.”
You work for/getting paid for them in some capacity? That would explain some things. Wasn’t sure if you were just a fan or just a promotion wing.
“There has been zero promotion of gTLDs across the board and I expect this to change shortly.”
When .web comes out, GD will push that hard, making most of these other ones an afterthought.
“diversification in domain investing is the only strategy that will work”
True, but diversifying in successful extensions, not novelties is a better strategy. Only 2 so far have broken 10,000, many just a few thousand.
Numbers speak volumes, it’s just a very low volume. Numbers are pretty bad.
In all fairness you should state that unregistry is a sponsor of yours, and anytime Konstantinos posts a blog, you simply go and write some dribble, and push him down on domaining.com, kind of childish. We all know about diversification, and putting different eggs in our baskets, like come on really?
Theo, this is no time for a test drive. We are in the race.
How is Uniregistry going to help the next round?
All new gtlds have zero promotion. These issues have nothing to do with promotion.
I cannot see those domains going cheap, they will most likely be sold thru DomainSales, effectively paying back their investment, as registration numbers are very weak. Even with .diamonds release today many of the premium $250 annual registration domains sit unregistered. Domainers are not willing to carry the registries risk if they want to gauge, or present them limited returns in regards to domain selection
I do feel sorry for some people as they had placed pre-registrations on a set amount of domains, and when they did not come due, their funds were tied up, and they were not able to purchase additional domains. Others kept purchasing premium domains, as they thought their was a glitch in the system, that may have been corrected, essentially reserving up even more funds. I know Donuts clearly states Registry reserved domain.
The .tattoo and .sexy registry were cherry picked, I see no reason why domains such as ”removemy.tattoo” be held back, multi keyword domain, if it was remove.tattoo fine, but how nitty gritty are you going to get? I guess this is where the register has to decide if they want to be in the domain selling business, or in the registry business, conflicting. There are 1000 more of these extensions still to hit. We are not even finished with month 1 yet, with many of these registries sitting at under 10,000, I do not see how they will ever hit 100,000 with premium renewal pricing.
1. Consumers don’t want these things.
2. Consumers don’t want these things.
Case closed.
They restricted the number of registries they were selling through, didn’t have their processes down pat ready for launch and then changed their pre-registration policies at the last minute with that reduced number of registries.
In the meantime, they tie up my money, having tied up up my time in persuing particular registration strategies.
At least they had the time and inclination to do a couple of nice videos whilst all this was going on.
Uniregistry can kiss my ass. A complete and utter fuck up and all he can come out with is some limp noodle statement about having learnt a few things. Hopefully the market will teach this half arsed outfit a lesson or two now for treating its early adopters like something the cat dragged in.
I would just like to know why they were not transparent on the thousands of domains they held back? They originally quoted 100 domains would be held?
http://www.thedomains.com/2014/02/23/your-tattoo-the-100-domains-uniregistry-reserved-for-tattoo/
These are the domains they allowed to own and use. Reserved domains are different and can only be sold.
Problem was we all were lead to believe the list of 100 was it. The public did not know the premiums were getting held back for sale at a later date.
With Uniregistry I thought so too. I maybe they had a change of heart. (or maybe that was the plan)
Maybe because of the very low numbers the first few new gTLDs had.
When you have 1,000,000 registrations you can afford to let go your 5000 best domains at reg fee.
When you have 10,000 registrations, you can’t.
The numbers for new TLDs registrations are beyond terrible. There is no hype at all. Literally nobody cares. I would estimate that the actual numbers vs registrars “projections” are off by between 10-fold and 100-fold.
Hope Schillster falls flat on his face & loses a lot of money
gTLDs BUBBLE BURST is happening very QUICK!!
Come on ROCKY Frank!! Ricks watching dancing
like Michael Jackson 🙂
im kind o sad about all this. i didnt take myself serous enough for website names but I was kind o looking forward to this just to have my hood on my webpage. thought it would make me look like the king! i got on it as soon as I could and was all fine. now I be hearing that theres no way i can have it now or be paying through my nose for it a while. makes me sad. i tell you someting theres no way this guy is part o the tattoo communty we rely on each other and our word. theres a lot o goodwill you know. but no i guess this tattoo thing is as far as being down with us as can be. be shame.
Constantino I applaud your honest comments…
much different to some of Frank’s cheerleaders and sponsors, the truth of the matter is that registrations landrush and auction numbers are terrible and sales are nowhere to be found…
Domainers (a dying breed) are not buying the diluted snake oil this time around… hundreds of new tlds coming this way…whoa!
i am very very disapointed about this golive
I checked for a very particular .sexy domain: it was available.
Went to check the price on another registrar and after 2 minutes was prompt to complete the registration on the first registrar. Now, after less than 2 minutes, the domain was “unavailable”.
That is the register wanting to choose which domains (requested by others, not reserved by them!) keep for them and which ones release.
That is a shame!