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Google’s .Dev domains are now available…for a hefty price

by — Services 1 Comment

Wealthy developers can get a .Dev domain today. Others should wait until next week.

Today is the first day that non-trademark holders can register domain names ending in .Dev.

Google is releasing the domain name in Early Access today. The Dutch-auction style phase started at 4:00PM UTC.

On the first day, expect to pay over $10,000 for the right to register a .dev domain. This drops to roughly $3,000 tomorrow and under $200 on Monday.

General availability begins February 28. Expect to pay around $10-$15 retail for .dev domains that Google has not marked as premium.

Google’s .app domain took off like a rocket ship last year and there are now more than 350,000 .app domains registered.

.Dev looks like it won’t be quite the same juggernaut. Sunrise trademark registrations appear to be lower than .app.

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Domain Name Rewind: domains in January

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CNBC’s The Profit, Prince settlement and great domain investor data were top stories last month.

Promotional picture for CNBC's The Profit TV show

The top story on DNW last month was a domain name lesson on The Profit.

Here are the top five stories on Domain Name Wire in January, as well as the DNW Podcasts for the month. The stories are ranked by views.

1. A domain name lesson on CNBC’s The Profit – Marcus Lemonis helped a toy shop upgrade from .net to .com as part of his investment.

2. Great domain investing data from Paul Nicks (GoDaddy) at NamesCon – Paul Nicks digs into domain investment approaches and returns.

3. Prince’s estate settles Prince.com fight with Domain Capital – It looks like Prince’s estate will get Prince.com in return for cash.

4. “Domain Name” is a pay-to-play search term on Google – There are no organic results (other than Wikipedia) above the fold.

5. How a Whois check could have halted a scam – a Wendi Deng Murdoch imposter tricked some photographers and a clue was in Whois.

Podcasts:

#221 – Google’s Ben McIlwain

#220 – Domain auction preview with Monte Cahn

#219 – WordPress Plugins + 2 more predictions

#218 – 2019 Predictions

You can listen to the podcasts by visiting the pages or downloading them on your phone’s podcast app.

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Google’s Ben McIlwain – DNW Podcast #221

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Learn about the HSTS preload list and how to add your domain (or entire TLD) to it.

dnw-podcastThis week Ben McIlwain of Google talks about SSL on domain names, particularly the HSTS preload list. Learn about the benefits of adding a domain name to this list and how an entire top level domain can be added.

Also: Prince settles, Scratch.org lawsuit, NamesCon, WordPress.com deal and Vegas, Baby!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 33:42 — 27.0MB) | Embed

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Email | RSS

Subscribe via iTunes to listen to the Domain Name Wire podcast on your iPhone or iPad, view on Google Play Music, or click play above or download to begin listening. (Listen to previous podcasts here.)

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Newspack could solve one of WordPress’ problems

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WordPress-for-newsrooms could help small publishers avoid the IT guy.

There’s a problem with WordPress: it’s too complicated for the typical small business owner. It’s also too complicated for the typical small news publisher.

So it’s exciting to hear that Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL), Lenfest Institute for Journalism, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and Civil Media are all contributing financially to an effort by WordPress creator Automattic to create Newspack. Google calls it “a fast, secure, low-cost publishing system tailor-made to the needs of small newsrooms”.

This sums it up nicely:

Journalists should be writing stories and covering their communities, not worrying about designing websites, configuring CMSs, or building commerce systems. Their publishing platform should solve these problems for them. So while Newspack publishers will have access to all the plugins created by the WordPress developer community, the core product is not trying to be all things to all publishers. It is trying to help small publishers succeed by building best practices into the product while removing distractions that may divert scarce resources. We like to call it “an opinionated CMS:” it knows the right thing to do, even when you don’t.

It will be exciting to see the finished product. Hopefully, this is a sign of things to come: easy-to-use installments of WordPress.

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.Com Winners & Losers

by — Domain Registrars 0 Comments

How domain name registrars performed in the latest official report.

ICANN has published the latest official data from Verisign (NASDAQ: VRSN) about the .com namespace. This registrar-by-registrar report covers September 2018.

Here’s how registrars did in terms of new .com registrations.

1. GoDaddy.com* (NYSE: GDDY) 868,031 (920,365 in August)
2. Tucows** (NASDAQ:TCX) 174,114 (200,563)
3. Xin Net Technology Corporation 170,284 (144,999)
4. Endurance+ (NASDAQ: EIGI) 143,179 (153,130)
5. NameCheap Inc. 139,581 (139,914)
6. Alibaba (HiChina) 133,156 (224,383)
7. Web.com++ 99,859 (103,022)
8. NameSilo 88,409 (86,955)
9. Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL) 85,550 (95,841)
10. 1&1 44,580 (47,333)

Here’s the leaderboard of the top registrars in terms of total .com registrations as of the end of September 2018. Base on trends, I suspect Google overtook GMO in October 2018.

1. GoDaddy* 49,079,269 (48,907,328 in August)
2. Tucows** 12,751,782 (12,816,784)
3. Endurance+ 7,335,322 (7,357,344)
4. Web.com++ 6,722,165 (6,722,545)
5. Alibaba 5,852,659 (5,813,977)
6. Namecheap 4,405,568 (4,354,411)
7. 1&1 3,688,497 (3,701,944)
8. Xin Net Technology Corporation 2,522,185 (2,376,346)
9. GMO 1,979,668 (1,993,491)
10. Google 1,953,943(1,903,695)

Many domain companies have multiple accreditations and I’ve tried to capture the largest ones. See the notes below.

* Includes GoDaddy and Wild West Domains
** Includes Tucows and Enom
+ Includes PDR, Domain.com, FastDomain and Bigrock. There are other Endurance registrars, but these are the biggest.
++ Includes Network Solutions and Register.com

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