After a short hiatus, we’re back with our Monthly Bulletin in the New Year. Read on to catch up with all the buzz and need-to-know information from around the industry that took place in the first month of 2018.
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- The TLD spinner: Donuts, the largest nTLD portfolio applicant, has launched a new free name-spinner tool for Domain name Registrars and Resellers. The name-spinner tool helps suggest relevant domain name options upon searching for a specific keyword for your next domain name. This comprehensive search tool is meant to be Registry-neutral, showing up search results from all TLD Registries worldwide, and aims to considerably help Registrars implement and boost customer experience on their websites.
- .PR partners with Afilias : The country code TLD for Puerto Rico, .PR, recently partnered with Afilias to leverage their back-end Registry platform, as announced by the former recently. A new and modern EPP based system will now allow .PR to make use of multi-fold advantages, including the primary trait of allowing Registrars worldwide to easily connect and sell .PR via Afilias, thereby boosting their distribution network exponentially.
- DomainNameStats.com now live! – www.namestat.org has been a popular site in the industry for a while, when it comes to gathering and displaying stats related to everything-domains. They have now introduced domainnamestats.com, an extensive domain stats site, in beta mode. This site upgrade comes with a bunch of detailed domain-related features, including the likes of list of newly registered domains, dropped domains, Alexa top million sites, etc.
- Home.loans acquired for $500,000: The most expensive domain name sale in the nTLD era took place last month, when home.loans was acquired for $500,000 from Donuts’ premium domains inventory. The .loans registry, Donuts, revealed Blake Janover, an entrepreneur, as the owner of this domain name, who is looking at building a website that home loan offers and information extensively. The sale of home.loans has now surpassed the previous most expensive nTLD domain name, which was credited to Radix for the sale of casino.online for $201,250.
- The TLD spinner: Donuts, the largest nTLD portfolio applicant, has launched a new free name-spinner tool for Domain name Registrars and Resellers. The name-spinner tool helps suggest relevant domain name options upon searching for a specific keyword for your next domain name. This comprehensive search tool is meant to be Registry-neutral, showing up search results from all TLD Registries worldwide, and aims to considerably help Registrars implement and boost customer experience on their websites.
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- Sandeep Ramchandani appointed as the CEO of Radix: Radix Registry, Asia’s largest nTLD portfolio applicant, recently announced the elevation of Sandeep Ramchandani as their new CEO. Sandeep, previously the Vice President and Business head at Radix, takes over from the company’s founder & ex-CEO, Bhavin Turakhia, who has now moved up to be the company’s executive chairman.
- ICANN cuts down on its nTLD budgets: ICANN recently published a report, talking about the contribution of nTLDs to its yearly domain revenues for 2017. The report states that nTLDs had a contribution of 51% to the total business, termed as below par by ICANN as compared to the projections set by the company in the middle of 2017. This could be one of the triggers for ICANN cutting its annual budget for 2018 by US $5million, where ICANN warned the community about difficult decisions that will be made amid a slowing domain name market.
- MMX hits profitability in 2017: nTLD Registry Mind + Machines announced profitability as an operating firm for the first time in 2017. The company’s announcement mentioned about a major boost of $10 million in the second half of the year compared to $5.6 million in the first, owing primarily to a boost in total domains under management by 67% overall.
We hope we’ve helped you catch up with all the latest news from the industry. Stay tuned for more, next month!
Simran is the youngest member of our Marketing team, at a whopping 21 years old! When she is not eagerly waiting for the weekend to head out and party, she handles all Social Media and Online Reputation Management for LogicBoxes.