Donuts has won the rights to operate the new gTLD .Movie beating out 7 other applicants including publicly traded Google, Amazon, and Dish Network.
.Movie was the last new gTLD scheduled to go to the ICANN last resort auction in January and was apparently settled by private auction.
The other applicants that have now withdrawn their applications for .Movie were Radix, Famous Four, ARI Registry Services, and NU Dot Co LLC, the company that sold the .Co registry to Neustar for $109 million dollars.
As usual the price of the private auction was not disclosed but with this group of applicants we would not be surprised at all if the extension sold into the eight figures.
No one applied for .Movies.
There is a new gTLD for .Video which was applied by and won by Donuts but assigned to Rightside (NAME)
No one applied for .Videos.
This new gTLD seems to have Hollywood written all over it, if Donuts exclusively promotes it for movies.
Instead of going to RandomNametheMovie.com, it could now be RandomName.Movie to see the official website and trailer.
We’ll have to see where Donuts takes this one.
The play is pretty obvious make it $99 per year, and 2 year minimum, and only the movie production company will most likely register one, as the upfront cost will be to high for speculators.
Why stop at $99 per year? I’m sure movie studios are willing to pay a lot more to market a movie.
If Donuts handles this well, then .MOVIE could become the Hollywood standard rather quickly — achieving critical mass faster than any other nTLD I can think of within a keyword niche. After all, Hollywood thrives on cliche and evolves through imitation. So once a few of the previews start referencing .MOVIE domains, the rest may follow suit nearly overnight.
But the industry has been content to use $10 throwaway domains with “Movie” or “theMovie” tagged on to the end; so they may not care to pay a king’s ransom. They’ve always had the option to do that, and they’ve ignored it.
Piece of cake to identify squatters on .MOVIE too.
Agreed, a 100M blockbuster movie, can in most cases go out, and buy their .com for under $25K, but they don’t do it, they just put Movie at the end of it, and call it a day.
If they beat out all those corporations to win the rights, I mean they have to recoup that investment thru some very aggressive pricing. It can’t be any of those insane $60,000 renewals we have seen in the past, this one needs a clear strategy, and as mentioned above it can become the benchmark. I don’t know if enough movies are produced each year so they can find that exact pricing sweet spot.
That was my thinking as well. Since the number of movie releases in any given year is low, the registry might want to charge more based on relatively low registration numbers. And if they do, the movie studios may ignore .MOVIE as they’ve been ignoring exact matches to their titles in .COM.
I think I can see the need if I close my eyes and try real hard, but most likely, this one will fail with each of the other new gtlds.
I think the owner of Movie.com is missing the boat by not selling subdomains like Jaws.Movie.Com
The problem can easily be solved without needing to screw up the domain naming system with the gtld cyber-garbage we are now seeing.
you don’t think .film has any place in this article?