Schilling will exit the new top level domain game if the price is right.
Frank Schilling’s top level domain registry UNR is planning to liquidate its TLDs in no-reserve auctions held on a single day.
The company currently has rights to 23 top level domain and will auction each of them for no reserve on April 28, 2021.
No reserve doesn’t mean the TLDs will sell for just a buck, though. .HIV, .juegos, and .llp will start a $0, but the other domains will have minimum bids ranging from $150,000 to $3 million.
While the company may end up selling off its top level domains, it’s not exiting the domain name business entirely. It plans to focus solely on its backend registry services and IP protection services.
In fact, it’s offering its “Registry in a Box” service to buyers of its top level domains if they’d like. It will even serve as a “Trustee” for any of the top level domains, meaning UNR will be the named owner and continue to operate the domains on behalf of the financial buyer.
UNR will use Innovative Auctions to handle the sale. Innovative Auctions handled the recent sale of .car, cars and .auto and was the auction service for many TLD resolution sets.
The unique auction should give us a good idea about the current valuation of top level domains.
.HIV? Seriously?
It was a charity thing, but the charity angle didn’t work out. So Frank bought it, kind of as a charitable act. I think it has some restrictions on it. .LLP also has restrictions that make it a tough extension.
There are no restrictions for .HIV. Of the 23 TLDs being auctioned, only .LLP is restricted. More details on this will be provided in the auction data room.
Each TLD is clearly marked as unrestricted (or restricted in the case of .LLP) on this page:
https://auction.link/tld-offerings/
Do they no longer have to contribute a portion of revenue from each sale?
Frank has been a proud contributor for more than five years, but this is not a mandatory contribution. There are no requirements/restrictions for the future owner.
Thanks for clarifying.
Seems like faced with lack of renewal rate and registrations selling most these extensions to the next mug serves it’s purpose best. Reminds me of when companies sell themselves for $1 to get rid of the liability of the legal entity, most of these extensions lack true validity of use, Goooooood luck to who ever wins any of those auctions I personally won’t be registering any of those extensions ever!
It won’t go unnoticed that under “Financials” for each of these TLDs listed at https://auction.link/tld-offerings/ the comparison to “How much are similar domains worth?” is dotCOM.
None of these are similar to dotCOM. If they were they wouldn’t be selling them :).
Yes, but the page warrants: “Dependable revenue streams with upside”, so it’s basically a no-lose proposition.
Once a domain names get through the first renewal, they can be incredibly sticky in terms of being renewed. Of course, there is a caveat in that renewal rates are linked to web usage and development. As a rule, undeveloped domain names generally have poorer renewal rates. Many of the new gTLDs have low renewal rates but those gTLDs focusing on the US/CA/EU markets often have a higer reg fee but have stronger renewal %s. Strange as it sounds, higher reg fees and renewal fees encourage renewals.
What’s even stickier than domain names is the flaming cheese:
https://tsdr.uspto.gov/documentviewer?caseId=sn90103328&docId=APP20200813091244#docIndex=7&page=1
New gTLD’s = AM Radio
i guess auction.link idea that registered on 26 jan 2021 comes from my $5 [ ***auctions.com] thread on the namepros (that was sold on sedo before for $888) 😉
Come one, come all! (one man’s junk . . . is . . . another man’s . . . treasure)
They’re all going to sell.
Every. Single. One.
Not viable in my opinion and will only appeal to very small buying group if at all.