Pool.com scores sunrise and landrush business for two domains, but this aspect of TLD launches isn’t as important as before.
Pool.com announced today that it will handle auction resolution for the sunrise and landrush phases for Austrian TLDs .wien and .tirol (its capital city and a province, respectively).
I won’t write about every company’s win for this type of service, but this one is newsworthy for a few reasons.
First, before the new TLD program came out, Pool.com was basically the only company to offer these services. That’s according to what a couple TLDs that previously launched have told me. Now Pool.com is competing with Sedo and Afternic (both of which have announced customer wins in this department).
Second, Pool.com has basically abandoned the expired domain market to focus on this sort of business, so scoring customers is very important for the company. This is the first customer win announcement for Pool.com that I’m aware of. [Update: apparently they’ve announced a few others.]
Third, sunrise and landrush periods are looking really different for new TLDs so far. They aren’t as important.
Domains that are launching early are getting relatively few sunrise orders. There are only about 20,000 marks in the Trademark Clearinghouse. Many trademark owners are likely waiting until general availability rather than messing around with the Trademark Clearinghouse.
As for landrush, some registries are even skipping this typical step in the process. Donuts is running a five day early access program sans auctions. They’re pushing their domains out to general availability sooner. Why? Let’s face it, the type of massive demand we’ve seen for the once-every-other-year TLD launch just isn’t there when hundreds of domains launch. Sure, some domains might get more than one order, but why bother with auctions when most domains will sell for just a few hundred dollars?
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