$41.5 million spent for rights to a single new top level domain name.
An auction to determine which company will control the .shop top level domain name has concluded with a record price of $41,501,000.
GMO Registry, a Japanese domain name company, was the last bidder standing.
It defeated six other bidders, including Amazon.com and Google.
Only GMO Registry and one other company bid above $15 million for the name.
The final bid price is sure to turn heads with the lackluster results of other new top level domain names that have launched to date. I’d love to see the financial projections behind GMO’s bid.
The battle for .shop has been long and heavily contested, in part because one applicant tried to circumvent an auction with some rather silly disputes. Commercial Connect tried to argue .shop was a community top level domain, and it also said that a number of IDNs were confusingly similar to .shop.
Commercial Connect didn’t participate in the auction but filed a last-minute reconsideration request yesterday claiming that it shouldn’t have lost its bid for community status.
ICANN has now collected over $100 million from new top level domain name auctions, but has yet to decide how to spend the money.
Chehadé can claim some large numbers during his tenure, but is the Internet a better place?
Afilias owns part of GMO. How much are they in this?
Source?
https://www.gmo.jp/en/company-profile/history/
October (2000)
Afilias is established as a worldwide consortium of 19 major domain registration companies.
That just means that GMO is a founding shareholder of Afilias. Nothing that indicates ownership the other way round, as claimed.
I would say this TLD makes most sense out of all of the new Gs just after .App
Too bad domainers won’t be allowed to sell .shop since the registry is not allowing leasing or selling of the extension.
Meaning it won’t be able to build a company on .shop and then sell it? Reminds me of the British government telling they will chase real estate owned by the former companies 😉 .Shop has only to lose imho.
On a positive note, companies making this kind of investment in the new tld space will only better publicize new tld’s and raise their public familiarity.
Quote “ICANN has now collected over $100 million from new top level domain name auctions, but has yet to decide how to spend the money.”
I assume they are in talks with Rolex so they can give Icann employees (men and women) a Rolex watch with an Icann logo on the back. Strictly for morale building. That should cost around $ 10mil.
Plus, due to the high stress of managing the internet, they should think about buying an island so staff and management can occasionally escape to re-charge.
“”” ICANN has now collected over $100 million from new top level domain name auctions, but has yet to decide how to spend the money. “””
$102,789,127.00 to be precise. For 13 new TLDs. Still far below for what .co was sold: $109,000,000.00.
So did they overpaid? The time will ay. Unlikely, but possible.
Coming back to ICANN with nearly $8 million per auctioned TLD, how many more of these will they have in the months to come? Wait for them to accumulate the entire JackPot and the parties to become yet juicier.
If I shop online. I’ll go to Amazon or eBay
I own an amazing domain. Will sell for 5 Million. It’s lux7even.com
Not that I am looking forward to it (hate to see the king devalued) but it might be a good idea for icann to start spending some of that money on promoting these new TLD’s so icann can continue to rake in reg and renewal fees for years to come.
hope the guy makes that many cash with his business he is running on that domain 🙂