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Catching up with Frank Schilling – DNW Podcast #324

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The legendary domain name investor reflects on new top level domains and talks about his upcoming sale of 23 strings.

Picture of domain investor Frank Schilling with the words "Domain Name Wire Podcast #324 Catching up with Frank Schilling"

Frank Schilling is exiting the top level domain business in a big way: he’s auctioning off his 23 top level domains on April 28 in what is sure to be an interesting event. On today’s show, Frank explains what’s behind the sale, what he got right (and what he didn’t) about new top level domains, and what his plans are for the future.

Also: GoDaddy closeouts, Super Bowl ad, and last month’s top stories

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Frank Schilling will try to liquidate his 23 top level domain names in a single day

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Schilling will exit the new top level domain game if the price is right.

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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.

UNR acquires .Trust and .LLP top level domains

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Company now runs 25 top level domains.

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Frank Schilling’s top level domain registry UNR has added two domain names to its stable: .Trust and .LLP.

This is the third home for .Trust, as Kevin Murphy reported last week. UNR says that MarkMonitor, CSC and Safenames are currently accepting pre-orders for .Trust domains.

The .LLP transaction was finalized in April, according to ICANN records. DotRegistry, LLC was the seller.

.LLP is a “corporate identifier” domain similar to .LLC and .Inc.

These domains have seen mixed results. .Ltd leads the pack with over 100,000 registrations. Over half of these are at Alibaba, and price seems to be a significant factor with first-year registrations at about $7. .Llc has 17,000 names in the zone. .Inc, which costs over $2,000 per year to register, has about 3,200 names in the zone.

Some corporate identifiers have restrictions, and my understanding is .LLP is currently set up to be restricted.

After divesting its share of .car, .cars and .auto, the two acquisitions bring UNR’s portfolio up to 25 names. There are 250,000 domains registered across its namespaces.

Frank Schilling and XYZ to sell .car, cars and .auto registries

by — Domain Sales 11 Comments

Three low-volume, high-price domain registries go on the auction block.

A picture of a row of cars at a dealer with .car .cars .auto overlayed in yellow type and a yellow bar

UNR and XYZ are selling three top level domains.

A partnership between Frank Schilling’s UNR and XYZ is auctioning off three domain name registries: .car, .cars and .auto. [Update 8/7/20: XYZ won the auction.]

The two companies partnered five years ago to bring the domain names to market. The three top level domains have generated combined revenues of more than $11 million so far and have a “predictable revenue stream of $1.7MM per year” with an average operating margin of 95%.

According to nTLD stats, all three registries combined have fewer than 1,000 registrations. But the partnership took a unique pricing approach to the registries. Retail prices for the domains are about $3,000 per year, significantly higher than most domains.

A new buyer could continue that strategy or choose a lower-price, higher-volume business model.

Frank Schilling told Domain Name Wire, “We both have made a lot of money from the strings and continue to, but we realize maybe the market wants it more than either of us. So this is a fair way to roll the investment.”

The auction will take place on July 13 and end the following day. Surprisingly, there will be no reserve. UNR or XYZ could technically bid in the auction under the same terms as other bidders.

Schilling noted that this is the first auction of new top level domain registries for which anyone can participate.

Innovative Auctions, which handled many of the private contention set auctions, is managing the auction.

May’s hottest domain name stories

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New TLDs, Frank Schilling and .org among popular stories last month.

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Here’s a look back at what caught the most attention on Domain Name Wire last month.

1. More and more companies are using new TLDs – There’s more use than before, but numbers games at some registrars is obscuring it.

2. GoDaddy assigns $88.5 million value to Frank Schilling’s domain portfolio – The accounting value is about $235 per domain.

3. New site shows available one-word domain names – Listen to a podcast interview with the student who created the site.

4. .Org registry sale officially terminated – It’s official now. And PIR wants to remind challengers that it will retain the contract to run it.

5. GoDaddy is paying $218 million for Neustar’s registry business – GoDaddy revealed the price for acquiring the registry business in its quarterly filing.

Podcasts

#287 – I interview the creator of OneWord.Domains and talk about a few issues in the domain industry. (Listen)

#286 – Adrian Kinderis discusses his long history in the domain business and the challenges of operating a new top level domain. (Listen)

#285 – Zak Muscovitch and I talk about the U.S. Supreme Court hearing about domains and trademarks, and direct what happened to the .org deal. (Listen)

#284 – Mark Andre explains how he built and sold four blogs for over $1 million. (Listen)

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