$2.2 million
Hey, it's only half a percent of Amazon's losses.
Would you blow $5.6m to own a dot-word? Meet a bloke who did just that
A further $13m was spent yesterday on auctions for the ownership rights to three new soul-sapping dot-word domains: .spot, .salon and .realty. Amazon outbid Google and gTLD powerhouse Donuts to pay $2.2m for the rights to sell dot-spot addresses; Donuts beat L'Oreal and two others for dot-salon at $5.1m; and top of the heap, …
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Friday 24th October 2014 09:49 GMT I ain't Spartacus
Re: A .realty terrible waste of money
I was even more confused. I persistently read the word as reality - probably because I don't use the US term realtor. And I was trying to work out who'd pay for a .reality address. God? Stephen Hawking?
I got an email this week offering our company the prime opportunity to register yet another version of our addresses. In this case it was .xyz - which is apparently for those who don't want to be tied down by being an org, a me, a com or any of the other myriad options.
I wonder how much I'd have to pay to become registrar for .bugger-off! And how many people I could get to register with me?
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Friday 24th October 2014 12:18 GMT Nuke
Re: A .realty terrible waste of money
"I got an email this week offering our company the prime opportunity to register yet another version of our addresses. In this case it was .xyz"
Same here. Seems like the whole thing is for the registrars to sell you more domain names because you "need" to defend your name.
Seems to me that the whole TLD thing is redundant. What follows the dot was already devalued before this new round of nonsense even began. Except possibly .ac and .gov it has long been meaningless and now even less by another order of magnitude.
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Friday 24th October 2014 12:44 GMT I ain't Spartacus
Re: A .realty terrible waste of money
I wouldn't quite say meaningless. I still look down on companies that have a .co at the end of their names. Unless they genuinely are Colombian of course. We specifically wanted a .co.uk because we're a small player, trying to look bigger, in an industry full of small companies with the rather obvious .biz at the end of their names.
But I guess you're right. When everyone searches for companies on Google, they just click the first link. And despite my best efforts, never look at what they clicked on first to see where they're going. Also I've told my Mum how to get to www.bbc.co.uk, but still found her typing it into Google's search box.
Definition: The Address Bar - archaic term - What your Grandad looked at, when he wanted to avoid all his money being stolen by Nigerian fraudsters.
The only time people might notice is when being given email addresses. I'm constantly surprised by the number of decent sized companies I talk to, where people have @btconnect.com after their names.
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Friday 24th October 2014 09:55 GMT I ain't Spartacus
Re: A two to five year ROI?
Ben 50,
That's not the ROI though. $50 x 50,000 = $2.5m. So that pays for your domain. Now you need some servers, some staff, an office, perhaps a call centre. Then you have to add in the cost of your capital, which you could probably get 5% sticking into corporate bonds. Or of course, you may have to borrow it, in which case it's costing you 5% + the opportunity cost of not investing it in something else.
I suspect that's one reason why it's not worth buying just one. There's a large risk of having zero registrants. Remeber .tel? Nobody else does.
However if you've registered a few tens/hundreds of these, and some pay off, then it's only one lot of infrastructure to run them. After all, the ones that fail will put almost no load on your system, as you watch your initial investment evaporate away.
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Friday 24th October 2014 16:11 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: And just what is wrong with
They've basically thrown the whole point of TLDs right out the window by fragmenting the DNS hierarchy like this. This is nothing more than a massive money making scheme by ICANN, in the same way as subdividing and auctioning radio spectrum is to the UK Government.
What a crock.
If the DNS system no longer needs to be hierarchical, what WTF do we need dot-anything any more(*)? Oh thats right, because some clever dick at ICANN realised they could rake in stupid amounts of money by conning the market into bidding $BIG$ for each word in the English language ... and beyond probably, by the time they get done milking this particular cash cow.
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Friday 24th October 2014 09:17 GMT Mage
Re: Weird Reality
An Estate Agent in USA is a Realtor. In Ireland an Auctioneer, possibly because in 19th C. an "Estate Agent" was a rent collector for Absentee Landlords.
.Reality is for reselling to USA Estate Agents
Yes, I agree it's daft, I have no idea why USA Estate Agents are Realtors
see www.realtor.com
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Sunday 26th October 2014 02:48 GMT Mark 85
Re: Weird Reality
Realtors deal in Real Estate in the States. I suppose there's a Not Real Estate or maybe a Fictional Real Estate. The term has always made wonder. I guess it's time for me to learn something....
Hmm... per the 'Net... first used in 1666. It's a legal term used in used in jurisdictions such as the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Nigeria, Australia, and New Zealand.
But nothing is telling me 'why' it's called that other than the legal "real property" vs. "personal property".
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Friday 24th October 2014 11:06 GMT Nigel 11
Vanity
If you want to part someone from a large sum of money, exploiting their vanity is a good way to do it.
I have yet to meet anyone who cares if a site is .com .co.uk .us .tv or anything more exotic. In most cases it is hidden inside an anchor tag, and they see some other phrase which they click on. Or they just type "amaz" (Amazon) or "lewis" (John Lewis) or "there" (for theregister) into their browser, and it finds the rest for you in an instant. Or they Google.
Isn't the main purpose of the DNS to insert a level of indirection, so traffic can be transparently diverted from one IP address to another. If the original design had been virtual and physical numerical IP addresses in a much bigger number-space than four billion (maybe 64 bits), would anyone have bothered inventing a DNS? They haven't invented one for telephone numbers and nobody seems to care. We just cache the useful ones locally and "Google" or "link" to the others.
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Friday 24th October 2014 11:51 GMT batfastad
Money
"Amazon outbid Google and gTLD powerhouse Donuts to pay $2.2m for the rights to sell dot-spot addresses"
Rights to sell? Or rights to stop anyone else selling?
Why? No idea. Maybe just to annoy Google by setting up .blog.spot
But I wonder what proportion of these extra TLDs will ever be publicly available. Donuts seem to sell alot of theirs but as a private company setup solely to do this, it makes sense. In order to apply for one of these you should have to make registrations publicly available within a year, that would stop big corporates from polluting the internet with .canon .google .sony etc.
So what happens to all the money ICANN are presumably grabbing from this? Filling a US.gov budget defecit no doubt, before ICANN is spun off to "neutral" ownership.
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Friday 24th October 2014 14:36 GMT Crazy Operations Guy
I've blocked every TLD longer than 3 characters, nothing of value has been lost
Some years ago, I blocked any DNS request for any name where the last component is longer than three characters (Was originally intended to prevent single-label names from getting outside my network) but now its blocking all this stupid gTLD bollocks (Also blocks .info, but was there anything worthwhile in there anyway?)
