Afilias adds another top level domain to its portfolio.
Domain name registry Afilias is acquiring the .Global top level domain, the company announced today.
Afilias already provides the backend registry services for the domain, so this should have no technical impact on domain name registrars that sell the domain.
.Global has about 50,000 registrations. It’s one of the healthier top level domains; it prices its domains high and has good registrar distribution. Retail prices are typically $50-$100 but the registry does first-year promotions.
GoDaddy is its top registrar with over 15,000 domains.
The top level domain also has healthy premium domain sales, which it publicly discloses on its site.
Rob Monster - Epik.com says
Hopefully a nice exit for the .GLOBAL team who worked hard to give birth to this idea. The .GLOBAL team did also build a slick software. As such, the deal might have been multi-faceted with some compatible technologies that carry over generally even beyond .GLOBAL. Rolf Larsen is a technologist, after all.
As for the .GLOBAL string, my sense is that the Voice.com deal last week has set the stage for the masses to shift back to .COM in a big way, and for speculative appetite to shift away from small registries that might be forced to change terms in a Draconian way, e.g. as Uniregistry did recently.
I continue to believe that the only way out for these new TLDs is to (1) shift the pricing model to Forever registrations, and (2) introduce enabling platforms that give meaning and utility to their strings. The apparent lack of urgency of the nTLD operators to bring real innovation to the market is truly remarkable.
Andrew Allemann says
Your reference to Uniregistry…is that about the price increases last year?
Rob Monster - Epik.com says
Yes, I was referring to extreme, non-projectable price increases by Uniregistry whose governance apparently allowed them to do that, or whose stakeholders would deem it acceptable to introduce that type of counter-party risk into the domain ownership relationship. There was no real heads-up, let alone debate or appeal. It ws only after public rebuke were legacy names grandfathered. When it comes to domain investment, which is often an exercise of “Arbitraging time”, that is not an operating model that empowers speculation.
Andrew Allemann says
That’s what I thought, just wanted to make sure I didn’t miss something new they did 🙂