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.Co co-founder predicts healthy results for .Health domain name

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Jose Rasco is applying his experience with .co to .health.

Jose Rasco, who helped drive .Co’s success, is leading .Health

There was a lot of euphoria a few years ago when the rights to new top level domains were being auctioned. Companies paid millions of dollars (and in many cases tens of millions) to acquire individual strings. One thing that I noticed during the auctions was one of the companies that consistently lost the auctions.

Between Nu Dot Co, LLC and STRAAT Health, LLC, Jose Rasco and Juan Diego Calle applied for 14 top level domain names. Yet they consistently lost bidding wars for the domains. They won only two, and one of them is for a domain it plans to sign over to Verisign. That means that, out of 14 domains, they will only run one: .Health.

Rasco and Calle have a lot of experience running a top level domain name. They were co-founders of the .co domain name relaunch in 2010 and successfully grew the domain before selling it to Neustar for over $100 million. This experience helped guide them through the auction process.

“Having run .co, we have a good idea what top level domains are worth,” Rasco explained to Domain Name Wire. “We weren’t going to pay more than a domain was worth.”

In other words, Rasco believes many of the domains they were competing for sold for more than their value. .Health was an exception.

“I’m very confident we’ll get a return on our investment,” he said. Click here to continue reading…

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.Boston domain names enter general availability today

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Standard registration fees are near .com prices.

.Boston domain names are available today.

The days of many notable top level domain names entering general availability are long gone, but there’s a noteworthy launch today: .Boston.

Domain names ending in .boston will be available today starting at 16:00 UTC, which is noon EDT.

Standard prices are fairly low; GoDaddy is charging $11.99 for one-year registrations. There are premium domain names but they have one-time premiums rather than annual premiums.

MMX (Minds + Machines, London AIM:MMX) acquired rights to the .boston domain name from The Boston Globe. It will be interesting to see if Boston Globe pushes the domain and what this will do for awareness.

MMX also runs .miami and .london. .Miami has 11,000 names in the zone and .london has 75,000.

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Great premium domain data from Radix

by — Domain Sales 1 Comment

How are premium domains doing for registries and registrars? Here’s some insight.

Radix just released some data on its premium domain sales in new top level domains for the first half of the year, and it paints a decent picture of how premium domains are doing for both registries and registrars.

From January to June 2017, people registered or renewed 727 premium domains across Radix’s portfolio of nine domains. 469 of these were new registrations and 258 were renewals.

For new registrations, Radix estimates about $640,000 in payments at the registrar level for these 469 names. All of these names have premium renewals as well. Here’s a breakdown of the revenue split for each of its top level domains:

Although .online had the most revenue, it was actually second to .tech for the number of premium domains registered because of the $200,000 casino.online sale. Here’s a breakdown: Click here to continue reading…

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Domain registrars hate registry exceptions

by — Domain Registrars 7 Comments

Registrars consider the cost of changes and number of customers impacted before implementing registry pricing exceptions.

The new top level domain name program has ushered in a new era of complexity for domain pricing. The biggest change has been multiple pricing tiers based on the domain. There was also complex variations for landrush. Now that domains have been out for a few years, we’re also seeing price changes and grandfathered pricing for some domain names.

For example, Donuts has changed the prices on a handful of domains and grandfathered existing registrations. Some registries, such as MMX, have dropped premium renewals but only on domains registered after certain dates. And Uniregistry recently jacked up the prices on many of its domains, but later agreed to grandfather existing registrations.

All of these changes create work for domain name registrars, and some of them are balking at the changes.

After dropping Uniregistry domain names in the wake of the price hike, GoDaddy now sells Uniregistry domain names but isn’t implementing grandfathering on the renewal of existing domains. I reached out to Godaddy to ask why. In a statement, SVP & GM, Domains Mike McLaughlin said: Click here to continue reading…

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.NYC’s most trafficked websites are actually legit

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40 are in Alexa’s Top Million, and they are real websites.

Since most sites that use new top level domain names are relatively new, you wouldn’t expect to find many that get a lot more traffic than well-established .com sites.

Typically, when I use DomainPunch’s Top 1 Million Alexa tool and search for specific new TLDs, the top ones are all spam sites.

But I decided to take a look at .NYC after seeing this tweet:

Indeed, .NYC has 40 sites in the top million. The top one is around #60,000, but the most important thing is that all of the domains look legit. This makes sense given the relatively high registration fees for the domains and the nexus requirement that registrants live or have a business in the city.

Alexa isn’t the world’s best ranking source, but this is still an indication that use of .NYC domains is growing.

I haven’t been to the city in a while, but I’m curious if people there have seen .NYC domains displayed in ads and on buildings in the city. It’s this offline promotion that will be critical to the domain’s success.

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