Scottish Government Moves From .UK To .SCOT

The government of Quebec decided at the last moment the cost was too great to move their domain names from .qc.ca to .quebec, but the Scottish government has decided the cost is not so great for their independence online.

This week the Scottish government commenced the move from .gov.uk to .scot for its websites, although to date only the home page resolves to a .scot domain while any links still go to .gov.uk websites.

It follows the Scottish referendum that was comprehensively lost in September, 55 percent to 44. But since then support for the Scottish National Party has grown significantly and now while not achieving independence, the Scottish government now has its own independence online.

“Using the .scot domain as our primary web address will be a visible symbol of the Scottish Government’s online presence and our involvement with the worldwide family of Scots who choose to express their identity or affinity online,” said Deputy First Minister John Swinney.

“The expansion of the number of top-level internet domains in recent times gives users many more options to brand themselves in new ways online – and we’re delighted to lead by example.

“Users will see the new web address on our site straight away but other changes to the infrastructure, including new email addresses for Scottish Government staff, will be introduced in a phased and structured way to ensure no one is inconvenienced.”

In Quebec, another with its own separatist supporters, the provincial government was set to take advantage of the province’s own gTLD but decided that for now an additional C$12 million of public funds, in addition to the $1.6 million it had already spent, could be better spent in light of budget cuts.

Governments are a great advocate with their websites viewed by a wide range of people across the community. Just like the Scottish government moving to the .scot is a huge benefit for the country’s gTLD, the decision of Quebec’s government is a major blow to getting visibility among the public and business.

General Availability for .scot commenced in September 2014 and there are now 8,300 registrations while GA commenced for .quebec two months later in November and it now has almost 9,000 registrations.

Buying.com Sells for $69,200 at NameJet

The domain name Buying.com was sold recently in a private auction held at NameJet for $69,200.

According to whois records, the domain name was first registered 1996. Domain Capital is shows as the current registrant.

256 bidders participated in this auction, which resulted in the largest domain name sale of the year for NameJet.

Congratulations to both the seller and the buyer.

Sedo’s February GreatDomains Auction is Underway! 37 Domain Names Already Have Bids

Sedo’s February GreatDomains auction is now underway. The auction features 75 domain names, out of which 37 already have bids.

Be.de received the highest bid so far, $13,000. JJ.de also managed to attract a lot of interest, and received a $12,000 bid.

MNB.com has already four bids, with the highest one of 10,100 EUR.

Other interesting domain names included in the auction are :

Webserver.com
Voicemail.com
Hearts.com
Westerns.com
MYM.com
Kissing.com
Agenda.com
Karte.e
Sled.com
Metal.net

To view the entire inventory and place your bids, check out Sedo.com .

Afnic – 2014, “Year Zero” for nTLDs

Afnic, the company behind .FR domain name extension,published the February 2015 edition of the Afnic Industry Report on Domain Names.

 

You can read the report after the jump :

“2014 ended with 470 gTLDs (generic top-level domains) in the root, including 39 using non-Latin characters, and 290 ccTLDs (country code top-level domains) of which 41 used  non-Latin characters. In all, there were no less than 760 TLDs in the root as at December 31, 2014, or an increase of 89% compared with 2013, and of 147% compared with 2012, the increase mainly being due to the new TLDs.

These figures prove by themselves that the domain name system has radically changed in a few months, more than during the first twenty years of its existence. The number of files still being processed by ICANN suggests that the phenomenon will continue in 2015 and 2016 to reach around 1,350 TLDs by the end of 2016.

For most of the TLDs in existence today, 2014 was the year of their launch and first confrontation with market realities.
Volumes below expectations

The first observation we can make is that worldwide demand in general has not been as high as the registries hoped. Even ICANN recently had to seriously revise downward its estimate of the installed base of domain names under the nTLDs for the 2015-2016 period.

The 3.7 million names announced by Ntldstats.com at the end of December 2014 camouflages the contrasting situations of the 327 nTLDs that had already completed their sunrise period by that date. If we base our analysis on ICANN reports, the latest of which extended up to the end of October 2014, 72% of the nTLDs launched by that date had less than 5,000 domain names and less than 1% had exceeded 100,000 domain names, often only as a result of highly aggressive pricing strategies.
The fee or free business model?

The nTLD leaders consisted of market players who had set up free purchasing policies enabling them to achieve very significant volumes. According to Ntldstats.com, by itself the .XYZ nTLD had 760,412 domain names at December 31, 2014, or 21% of all the new domain names registered by that date.

No doubt the logic on which these strategies is based is that the crucial issue for any new TLD is to achieve the critical mass that will allow it to become sufficiently well-known to establish its image among users and thus become a customary provider. The reasoning holds true but is still a gamble, since everything depends on the turnover rate at the end of the first year. It also relies on the fact that the success criterion of a TLD is volume, when there may be other metrics that should be taken into account.
Value creation as an alternative to the “low cost” approach

While some registries “give away” their domain names as if they were “worthless”, at the risk of depreciating the users’ viewpoint of TLDs, others are willing to pay large sums to gain control of a TLD during private auctions or those organized by ICANN. In the case of ICANN auctions alone, for which the figures are publicly available, the 10 TLDs acquired by that means generated a total of no less than $ 35 million in sales, an average of $ 3.5 million per TLD plus the costs of ICANN files and the compensation of back-ends.

It is clear that the organizations that are prepared to invest $ 4 million in a TLD are convinced of its value and the return on investment they can expect to earn from it. But the abundance of new TLDs can also hinder their perceived value among users, who often need to be convinced of the benefits they will reap.
TLDs in search of meaning

Forcing their way through thanks to large volumes of sales is by far the strategy adopted by most nTLDs. The vast majority of them focus on specific segments in terms of activities, usage or user communities. This means that volume, although always impressive when it exists, cannot be considered an absolute “standard”. The analysis must be completed by studying the utilization rate and whether or not the dynamic is sustained over time (as opposed to sudden surges generated by promotions). In 2015, the turnover rate will be the key test to know whether the TLDs launched in 2014 have managed to find their market, or if they are still struggling to reach beyond the small circles of rights holders seeking to protect their brands, and domain name speculators on the lookout for good opportunities.
2015 forecasts indicate a trend line of 8-10 million domain names under the nTLDs

If we extend the trend line observed in 2014 through to year-end 2015, we see that the goal at the end of that year is slightly over 8 million domain names, i.e. doubling in twelve months, all other things being equal.”

Check out Afnic.fr for more details.

Closing Date Approaching: Nomination Period For 2015 ICANN Multistakeholder Ethos Award | Award Presentation Planned for ICANN 53 | Nominations Close 02 March