In a story published by Xbiz.com today, Stuart Lawley CEO of ICM Registry the company that operates the .XXX registry, renewal rates of .XXX domain names “are exactly in line, or in many cases, ahead of those enjoyed by other registries”
.Com domains tradtionally run around 73% renewal rates and one of the newest extensions, .Co are running right around 70%.
Lawley said that “Around 9% of original registrations were for multiple years.”
Of the 225,000 domains Lawley says are “under management” that would include the 80,000 or so 10 year blocks that ICM sold to trademark holders for a one time fee.
Additionally we know there are a substantial number of defensive .XXX registrations that are paid on an annual basis which we can assume will have almost a 100% renewal rate.
Lawley, told xBiz that .XXX numbers have “comfortably exceeded the company’s sales expectations — based on the figures it communicated back in 2003 and 2004 in its original application to ICANN”.
“We had forecast around 25,000-40,000 registrations by now and a total of 125,000 after five years and we currently have more than 225,000 names under management,”
Lawley claims 225,000 domains “under management”. If you subtract 80,000, you get 145,000. However, RegistrarStats.com shows less than 120,000. Is the difference between 145,000 and 120,000 simply “reserved” names like DonaldTrump.xxx (and various political figures, and even ICANN-related figures like VintCerf.xxx and RodBeckstrom.xxx)? If ICM goes out and “reserves” a lot more domains (e.g. astronomical names, etc.), they can claim as many names “under management” as they want, but those aren’t paying customers.
You’ll recall that on this very blog, Stuart Lawley claimed 900,000 “expressions of interest” last year, for 650,000 unique domains:
http://www.thedomains.com/2011/07/17/icm-registry-900000-expressions-of-interest-for-a-xxx-domain-name/
According to BusinessWeek in 2010:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_28/b4186038373596.htm
“If Lawley’s bid is approved—ICANN’s next board meeting is in December—he says his company, ICM Registry, stands to bring in $200 million a year selling Web addresses at $60 a pop.”
“The bottom line: ICM Registry says its position as the sole purveyor of dot-xxx addresses may bring it $200 million in sales per year.”
It’ll be interesting to see the real numbers, once the non-renewing names are dropped from the RegistrarStats.com figures (in a few weeks), and in the ICANN Monthly Registry reports (albeit with a 3-month lag for the ICANN data).
Most domainers I know are all dropping their .XXX domains, including myself.
Most threads in forums about .XXX confirm this as well.
I can’t imagine the renewal numbers looking any good in a few weeks/months from now when all stats are updated.
The 80K blocks that ICM sold to trademark holders will still be there and around 25K “reserved” names. And maybe an additional 10K names that will be renewed.
The 225,000 names they have under management will be halved pretty soon imo.
another extension will bite the dust, but someone will make some money. guess who will be.
.Xxx will succeed for all the reasons I’ve stated in virtually every .Xxx story on this site. I do not intend to restate it all here. But even a supporter of .Xxx like myself has stated that I expect a LOT of folks to not renew their .Xxx domains. Why?
1. Domainers who bought average to terrible domain names and expected to flip them for an immediate profit. They never had an interest in developing their domains. It was pure speculation. As I’ve previously stated, .Xxx will succeed over time. You can’t expect a domain that came out in Dec 2011 to compete with .Com for example, which came out in 1985, in terms of volume. But speculators need not have applied.
2. Cost. I think ICM Reg should drop the price of their domains. I understand based on changing algorithms .Xxx’s value may actually increase, but the domain price should be more reasonable. I feel the price should be more in line with .Co. Just my opinion. I suppose ICM Reg can charge what the market will bear.
I’m GLAD to see the speculators drop off. I hope it happens in greater volume than ICM Reg anticipates. ICM Reg needs to separate the wheat from chaff. Personally, I don’t want to see another .Com in the making… with an infinate number of domainers just sitting on domains waiting to sell them to the highest bidder. How many .Com domains are not in use? Parked pages. Useful to no one. .Xxx will succeed based on the quality of it’s content, the safety of it’s content (all sites are scanned), the ease of seach (seach.xxx) and the changing algoritihms of other search engines possibly ranking .Xxx sites higher.
I have no issue with reserved .Xxx names or trademarked .Xxx names. Take them off the grid permanently for all I care. My issue is with domainers, who have taken names they never intend to use, so as to sell them to the highest bidder. Sedo has thousands of .Xxx domains for sale, asking $10,000, $5,000, $1,000, etc.. If those greedy speculators, who never intended to develop their domains, want to drop them, I say please do! Let’s get the speculators out and the developers in. Or at least make those speculated domains generally available again until a developer(s) comes along.
A combinations of speculators and cost is why you will see more .Xxx domains not renew than ICM Reg anticipates. In my opinion.