According to Stuart Lawley the CEO of the ICM registry the company that operates the .XXX TLD, there has been a sale in a Sunrise or Landrush auction for a .XXX domain name into the six figures
According to Mr. Lawley comment made on thedomains.com to a post, the landrush or Sunrise auction wound up at $121K.
Although Mr. Lawley did not identify the domain name, he gave a clue:
“”First wave of auctions closed , highest auction figure for closed auction was yesterday , eight character name for $121,000
Next wave of announcements coming soon”
Mr. Lawley also states that there are now over 198,000 .XXX domains under management since launch and 110,000 since December 6th.
$121K For a .XXX closed auction is certainly a nice sale.
I will be interesting to see what the domain is once its announced.
The highest closed auction I have on my board is CamChat.xxx which closed at just over $5K
it would need at least 2 people in the world stupid enough to compete in an auction to get to 121k for a .xxx domain
i dont buy that
maybe others are more stupid though.
B-u-l-l-s-h-i-t.xxx ? That’s 8 characters.
The domain was auctioned by the registry itself?
Have any been auctioned in the secondary market as of yet?
All The Land Rush/ Sunrise auctions are being run by Pool.com on behalf of the registry.
You would have had to make a sunrise or Land Rush application to have participated in the auctions.
There were some .XXX auctioned off at TRAFFIC in Ft. Lauderdale in October before the extension was launched
More lies. Just look at the numbers from TRAFFIC–the only fully transparent auction to have taken place. Lawley also claims, on DomainGang, that only 5% of the registrations are defensive. His lies are so outlandish that they have become my most reliable source of comic relief.
Ann
So your saying Stuart is making up the auction and the sale.
I guess we will see when the auction results are announced and the domain is revealed.
@michael
thanks. I’ll be curious to see when the first batch of top tier XXX domains are put up for auction in the secondary market. Perhaps it will be a while yet, since the registry is so new, but it would probably only drive demand for more registrations. I expect the sale of gay.xxx for $500k and the media attention it got drove a lot of Landrush applications. Smart marketing there.
@40z That’s precisely what the pie-in-the-sky-domainers refuse to acknowledge: there is no secondary market. A lot of domainers are going to be stuck with some very expensive parked pages.
@Ann
How can there be any third party auctions when we can not transfer name ownership for two more month?
Your bias is showing.
good for them, but saying %5 regs are defensive is bullxxxsit
@ Ann
I notice that you attack ICM in many different FORA and clearly have an axe to grind with .xxx which is fine, but I do object to you using the term “lies”.
As MHB correctly points out the auctions are carried out by a third party Pool.com and there are hundreds in play with many results in the hundreds of dollars, some in 4 figures, some five figures and so far just one over $100,000.
The results for the .xxx names sold at TRAFFIC were perfectly acceptable to both the buyers and the Registry.
From what I understand if the bidding gets over around $8,000 Pool.com carry out deeper financial due diligence on the prospective bidders.
The names are NOT any of the Premium Generic Names offered directly by the registry (which will begin to be released very shortly) they are simply the contested Sunrise and Landrush applications.
We will approach the successful bidder shortly and ask his permission to publicize the sale, just as we have done with our previous sales. Some, like Corbin Fisher are happy to take the publicity , others prefer not to.
One must not forget that .XXX is a speciality domain with a price tag to match and by any measure, dollars or quantities, given the price point the launch has been a success compared to a) our plans and b) ANY other previous TLD launches.
I’m not talking about selling domains today. Of course you have to wait, as with most domain transfers.
All I am saying is, if you are considering a .xxx purchase, do not rely upon the man who owns .xxx (Lawley) or the men who get paid to advertise/promote .xxx (e.g. Berkens) for your information. Do the research yourself. If you want to know how many registrations were defensive, look at the root zone file. Does it look like only 5% are defensive? If you want to know how .xxx is being used, search: [site:.xxx] You’ll find a few dozen whitelabels, cloned sites, and “wishful-thinking” sites. Do you see any brand names? I see one. If you want to know about the secondary market, read the adult webmaster forums. In fact, I encourage you to try to sell a .xxx site on gfy.com.
All I am suggesting is that not everyone is willing to drink the kool-aid. Some might prefer to think for themselves.
Ann
Just to be clear I don’t get paid to promote the extension.
.XXX buys an ad
You must have forgot about all of the News and stories i reported on Moniker that were less than positive while they were buying ads.
We are sold out on the two top spots of the blog and have people waiting to come on board.
We report news, events and developments and we take people at their word until proven otherwise and let the chips fall where they may.
A six figure landrush/ sunrise sale is news since the auction is limited to just a few participants who put apps in.
We reported the same for the .Me registry land rush auctions and I don’t think they have ever bought an ad from us.
Lets not be so loose throwing the accusations around.
I, in no way, called your personal integrity into question. I am calling your objectivity as a journalist into question–as I do with all “journalism.” It’s called “critical thinking.” Before I accept a FOX news story at face value, I might want to remember that Rupert Murdoch owns the station and that Morality in the Media is sponsoring that particular segment. Before I accept a “news” report on MSNBC, I might want to remember that Al Sharpton is not a non-partisan journalist and that Move-On is sponsoring the program. There simply is no such thing as comlete objectivity or neutrality in reporting. Therefor, I encourage people to seek out raw data for themselves.
You can tell yourself that you are a completely neutral, objective reporter–the only one in the world, if you want–but I don’t believe you.
Ann
In this case regarding this sale there is no raw data.
I either have to take the CEO of the company for his word or choose to believe he is just lying as you have said.
I’m going to take him at his word, also knowing the auctions are being run by another company.
As far as objective, I call them like I see them.
I generate well into the seven figures every year as a domainer and make less than six figures doing the blog.
You do the math.
It would be nice to see a list of the domains sold at the prices paid. Perhaps they are waiting for the payments to be confirmed, wouldn’t look good to announce the sales and then have the buyers back out. It will be interesting to watch how this extension does. On a sidenote, internet TV is going to get big, which could be a shot in the arm for .tv and .xxx names for specialty channels. Imagine watching a tv show, surfing the internet and tweeting on Twitter all on your tv. It’s coming.
“I generate well into the seven figures every year as a domainer and make less than six figures doing the blog. You do the math.” Therein lies the problem. Therein lies the bias. Therein lies the corruption.
Do you think that Mercedes makes more money by selling cars or by running MercesForum.com? Well, gee, if they make so much more money by selling cars, why in the world would they bother running MercedesForum.com?
Gotta go. I’m trying to find out which has the nicer interior, Jaguar or Mercedes. I’m going to find out by checking mercedesforum.com. They’ll tell me the truth.
Ann
So you started off by saying:
“”All I am saying is, if you are considering a .xxx purchase, do not rely upon the man who owns .xxx (Lawley) or the men who get paid to advertise/promote .xxx (e.g. Berkens)””
When I tell I don’t get paid anything to promote .XXX except they advertise then I tell you that their ads are about equal to about .0000001 of my income, you say
“Therein lies the corruption”
At least you compared me to a Mercedes not a Yugo so appreciate that.
I’ll stand on my record and the thousands of posts I have put up.
Speaking of record, maybe one day you will identify yourself, and who you work for or represent and your background and thereby what bias you may or may not carry into the discussion
Domains
I would like to see the list too
Hot topic, follow up.
@ Ann
Firstly , I live in the southern hemisphere and I never met Stuart or Michael . I have been in the domain industry for less than 2 years and I came across this blog “the domains” only last Sepetember 2011 coincidently. I considere myself to be an entrepreneur with some luck in life (and luckily with MBA). Before I decided to invest one dollar in the .xxx I digged deep in the whole business model and did a considerabale work investigating the company and the people behind it. I listened to every interview and conference and read , studied and analysed every press release the company made since March 2011, or before that. I came to the conclusion that the .xxx is truly a revolutionary product that will make a significat change to the internet in a positive way by providing all society members with safe, legal and high quality prducts and services primarily related , but not limited to, Adult.
Secondly, last October I tried to pre- register a .xxx and I found out later that that specif ic domain was not available eventhough my registrar showed that they did actually pre-registered it. Ofcourse I was upset and I asked for an explaination from ICM Registry directly on this forum. Stuart Lawely was kind enough to respond quicky to the question marks I raised and he explained his side clearly. I then found out that his explaination was 100% correct and acurate. It turned out that many registrars’ data systems still show that some domains , regardless of their TLD, are available while in fact they are not available (or already registered) !
Its great to see this sale imo and great for .xxx extension. I own 2 .xxx domains . Lets see more sales happening.
Ok. This is what puzzles me. Mike and .xxx founder-no offense. Just stating my 2 cents.
In a nut shell, how is .xxx going take off when half the world censors .xxx extension. Frank, many others talk about direct navigation. Ok cool, but half the world is blocking .xxx extension. Strike 1 and I bet other countries will block it as well in future.
Strike 2 and this is for “domainer market”
This reminds me of .tel in so many ways. We cant park our investments. What rights does .xxx say we cant do this. We all know how .tel is doing. When we cant park names, show direct navigation(assuming there is this), the .xxx extension becomes less liquid. Less demand for for our names as well. Also a good portion of our investments wont resolve because there not parked either. Now the flip side this is a “developer extension” and encourages that end user to go out and get a site made up. Ok fine but lets admit this how many of us pure domainers are actually going do this. Not me.
Strike 3
Did a trouble ticket and it took ICM over 10 days to respond. Ok, I get there busy. But 10 days. You for real? ICM has so much information on each owner that shit some of our family members dont even know. Disagree on the process of how this went down and the complex nature of things(cluster fuck). Yes I said cluster fuck. Very disorganized outfit.
Strike 4
Why did godaddy have special treatment in grabbing names way before anyone else. Name.com wasnt prepared neither when all this was suppose to begin. Then they said they decided delay for an hour. In the meantime godaddy were the ones that had an hour going of regging before anyone else. I blame ICM on this too.
Sorry for the tone and off topic remarks. Time will tell on our investments. But things needed to be organized. I am holding on for 3 to 5 years. Maybe add more possible.
Jeff
You don’t and can’t offend me by arguing against me on the merits.
Ann telling me I take shill for people, well that pisses me off.
Any back to you my friend:
“”how is .xxx going take off when half the world censors .xxx extension”””
I think that is a BIG overstatement. There are only a couple of countries that are blocking .xxx and you would never get a paying customer out of their anyway.
Your paying customers are only going to come from a handful of countries and the US, Canada, the UK are not blocking .xxx
Adult sites in general are blocked (or are suppose to be) by parents, school, etc through the use of software .com or .org or .xxx.
So I disagree with your premise on strike 1.
Strike 2, “We cant park our investments.”
Why not?
No parking only applied to founders names not domains you get through sunrise or land rush or GA.
Moreover you can send the traffic to affiliate sites.
Strike 3 I have no comment on. If it took ICM 10 days to respond to an issue that was on their end its too long agreed.
Strike 4 wasn’t aware Godaddy had GA before anyone else, thought the GA and all registrars were delayed an hour, not sure this is accurate but ICM can chat about this one as well.
How about some possible positives.
What if some governments in a year or 5 years, start requiring adult sites to use a .XXX. for adult content, what happens to the value then?
What happens once the new gTLD’s come out 500 of them or 1K of them or in 5 years 5K of them and there is one for each major city and every vertical and consumers start to understand the whole “right of the dot” thing and .XXX is the only adult extension.
What happens to the values of .XXX then?
How about the micropayment system and advertising ICM has planned to get consumers to use .XXX domains.
Theses are the issues you get in any new extension.
They are highly speculative in nature but I obviously think the extension has a lot of upside and that’s why I invested in buying some.
@mike ok.. thanks..
i agree there are a few strengths. One being gov wanting .xxx for adult sites. Maybe it will happen, maybe it wont. Thats a huge point and can go either way imo.
Obviously you have a much bigger position in adult.com market and even though you you have an invested interest in .xxx your investment in the .com market surly succeeds .xxx.
I dont know much about micro payment system. Thats a huge benefit but PornHub and all the tube sites are free. They wrecked paid adult viewing.
I know first hand what godaddy was doing and name.com. I had to wait around because I had a credit dollar amount with name.com. Heck they were not even prepared at the first suppose time. Network Solutions was prepared. Godaddy was prepared. But what puzzles me is godaddy allowing things before everyone else. Cant comment on other outfits.
Maybe Im wrong on the population blocking .xxx extension and 50 percent is a bit much. Lets say 30 percent possible. Maybe I should research this more, get all the countries together that are banning and count the population. But I will say this-I bet the numbers will be a lot more Mike then what you think IMO. Who knows.
I am all for speculation. I have investments outside for .com market. Its speculative and land of opportunity for everyone to make money. Money to be made each day. Drops, .com, new extensions. Many will flop IMO. If anything, this will confuse the internet user even more. .Com works. .Com sells. Let them role out 1000 new extensions. Speculation. I like .nyc. I like .eco. Some .geo names like .Paris.
Again im holding. Maybe buy more. Maybe watch. But lets see how it goes when year one renewal time hits like .co results. Then year 2 will be the true indicator amongst the domainer market in .xxx
@Jeff
1) what countries are blocking? India- no- China – No Lots of chat but no real actions- as expected
2)You can park. As MHB pointed out the “no park” rule wear just for Founders Names
3) Sorry. Our bad. membership arrangement is quite complex, but a requirement under our ICANN contract.
4) Every registrar did GA at same time. There WAs a on hour delay which was due to a technical hitch our end and no names were allocated during that period. EVERYONE had EQUAL access at 12.00 EST, no special treatment.
Jeff
The music industry was in the same situation before iTunes.com another micro payment system.
The of course need to take strong legal action against those that share or download content that is not licensed
@Stuart Lawley
thanks in comments. I tried parking my names at 2 different spots and not resolving.
And yes godaddy did allow things. My friend and I had monitored certain names and things were being grabbed at godaddy. But either way, some places were not prepared either. Hope Name.com will be prepared in future on new extension role out.
Also good luck in manwin issue. You will win and congrats-mark my words
@Mike
Understand
Either way its going be interesting.
“What if some governments in a year or 5 years, start requiring adult sites to use a .XXX. for adult content, what happens to the value then?”
I thought the anti-SOPA movement was partly about keeping the Government out of our DNSes?
Can you think of an example where the Federal Govt can create a mandate that forces you to have to pay fees (10x than any other equivalent service ) on a private business (creating a legalized monopoly)?
Can you think of a precedent where the Federal Govt can systematically enforce companies to rebrand after spending millions of dollars on their other extension?
Let’s be realistic with the arguments. It won’t ever happen. The government can’t even get the Internet community to say that intellectual theft is bad – and those that do say it’s bad often laud the efforts of Google to provide “free information”.
The whole internet is mad- which I could rephrase as – people are too easily to manipulate with over-simplified generic arguments.
(MHB states a need to enforce licences, to his credit).
When it comes to adult and governments you never know
There are places in the US you can go to jail for selling the same item its perfectly legal to sell in 98% of the US.
Forever is a very long time and the world is a big place.
@Stuart
Why won’t the registry simply provide a breakdown of the total number of registrations? What have you got to lose?
Apparently the are 198,000 domains under management. How many of these are defensive registrations, how many blocked domains (reserved) and how many are real registrations?
“There are places in the US you can go to jail for selling the same item its perfectly legal to sell in 98% of the US.”
Hardly applicable to something as broad as the Internet 🙂 But understand never say never. I don’t believe the Government will ever broadly advocate another monopoly (like ICANN/IANA) when it comes to parts of the internet. If there is a need – the businesses will create the solution – a new private internet for adults only. This is more likely but they are hardly likely to depend on .XXX as part of that solution…. but never say never.
The Internet is a giant scamopoly.
@Robert
How do we spot a “defensive” registration? What constitutes such ? particularly so early on?
Does any other registry publish that information? if so whom?
It takes a little time to build and develop new websites.
198,000 is a lot of names to go through looking at each one….
We submit our reports to ICANN in exactly the same formate as the other GTLD and STLD operators and they are published on ICANNS website for public consumption.
Registrants are still going through the membership process and matching tokens to names at the present.
@ Anne
It’s funny that you continue to assail Michael Berkens on his own blog.
I would tell you that you make it almost impossible for anybody to have a rational conversation while you are lobbing insults at everybody but you already know that. I would also tell you that your comments that mention “Fabian” so familiarly make you sound like you are directly associated with an organization that declared war on .XXX. But you already know that too 🙂
PS Mike Berkens openly invested over six figures of his own CASH into .XXX. If you don’t like or want to read his perspective on domains including .XXX domains, I can’t imagine why you would want to read this blog. Unless of course you are reading it so you can grind your PR axe in the comments section. For somebody who has openly stated her hostility towards domainers, you sure spend a lot of time on domain blogs!
@Stuart
“How do we spot a “defensive” registration? What constitutes such ? particularly so early on?” Surely you know how many Sunrise B. Applications were approved?
You also know how many domains are on the reserved list. Are the domains on the reserved list included in your domain count of 198,000?
Are Sunrise B. registrations included in the 198,000?
Don’t get me wrong. I actually wish you the best of success and also support .XXX. I simply don’t understand why you won’t publish these numbers. What have you got to lose?
.XXX is something that will build over time.
Who cares what other registries do or what they publish. Just because they may not publish this info, doesn’t mean it is right. It actually reflects poorly on them, as it takes away from their credibility.
Just won SanDiego.XXX in the auction. It will make a great “personals” website for San Diego.
Couldn’t be happier…
-Peter
@Internet Media
Congrats. We have same line of thinking for Boulder.xxx among others
Perhaps we can downgrade “lies” to deliberate lack of transparency.
It’s not the lack of transparency that is itself actionable. But it’s what that nontransparency allows the registry to accomplish without the usual risk of liability. The domain name business thanks to its lack of transparency attracts some very seedy players.
ICM portrays itself as a “different” sort of gtld, with special rules and special value. (As will more future new gtlds. Watch for it.)
But if this if true, if ICM had the unique opportunity to innovate upon prior gtld’s, then they could have instituted rules to deliver the transparency that existing gtld’s fail to provide.
For example, they could give the public access to accurate information and about aftermarket sales. There is absolutely no way currently to verify reported domain sales. The sales are largely anonymous and “verification” is all based on trusting someone’s word. Given that this is the internet, the “word” may never be given in person.
Buyers and sellers may never meet each other.
Alas, some people are going to take advantage of that situation.
ICM had an opportunity to chnage the rules and add transparency.
They did not. They use Pool.
Pool has a long, colorful history in the aftermarket business. Do some research and you will learn about it. The aftermarket is filled with scams. The nontransparency allows some very questionable practices to go virtuallly unnoticed.
But it does not have to be.
===================================================
However, a registry like ICM and other new gtld’s have zero desire to change this.
===================================================
They want to profit form the existing state of affairs (lawlessness?), where information to buyers can be controlled to an extent that allows practices that would, in a more transparent environment, be easily identified and perhaps prosecuted.
To put it simply, if the buyer knew what the registries, registrars and large scale buyers knew, the aftermarket would be very different. The pie might fall out of the sky for many wannabe domainers.
All that said, there are probably some honest people in the domain name business.
It’s up to you to decide who they might be.
Stuart the 5 % defensive is IMO very low, I think its much more. We have written several articles on many universities regging more than just one .xxx. Colorado regged 27, Why would they need CU.xxx ? Michigan regged 21 some of them bad names that seem like waste of money (not your fault). Michigan State regged 0, I think that was the correct stance, because you took away BusinessWeek.xxx from the squatter who regged that, so if someone regs MichiganState.xxx are you not inclined to take that domain back ?
@Boulder and Internet Media
Had the same line of thinking about local personals, and got some key area codes for vegas and san francisco
You can only tell that stuart is lying when his lips move. You claim that only a small % of registrations are defensive….you are on the record as saying you do not recommend that organizations use the extension defensively yet you spend millions on the “PROTECT YOUR BRAND” marketing. Fortunately for you there are is no shortage of scared fools in the world.
Ah the first $xxx,xxx xxx sale and the name is xxxxxxxx? What a joke. We sold a name but cant say what it is.
Anybody care to share what auction prices they have seen?
Peter
I was bidding against you for a while
Congrats
Asher
I have some figures on closed .xxx auctions I was in just waiting a few more days for some more to close out
$5,075 is the highest one I have been involved with so far (lost)