Schilling’s North Sound Names Is No Longer The Top Registrant of New gTLD’s

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Frank Schilling’s North Sound Names has been the largest registrant of new gTLD domain names for about as long as ntldstats has been tracking registrants.

However North Sound Names has been knocked off from the top spot by West263 company out of China

According to ntldstats, North Sound Names owns has just over 230,000 new gTLD domain names.

“West263 Company” is the registrant of 253,459 new gTLD domain names according to ntldstats.

There are just short of 18 Million new gTLD domain names registered.

Only 6 registrants of the top 40 registrants of new gTLD domain names are from counties outside of China.

Frank Schilling also owns Uniregistry which is a new gTLD registry and most if not all of North Sound Names are registered in Uniregistry extensions.

It is not immediately clear if West263 Company is the same company that owns the domain registrar west263.com.

About Michael Berkens

Michael Berkens, Esq. is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of TheDomains.com. Michael is also the co-founder of Worldwide Media Inc. which sold around 70K domain to Godaddy.com in December 2015 and now owns around 8K domain names . Michael was also one of the 5 Judges selected for the the Verisign 30th Anniversary .Com contest.

Comments

  1. Joseph Peterson says

    At this stage, I haven’t really researched that portfolio. Is anybody aware of registry connections?

    I mean, the North Sound Names portfolio essentially has zero carrying cost. Renewals there would be Frank Schilling taking money out of the wallet in his right pocket, paying himself, and putting the money into the wallet in his left pocket.

    So if this West263 portfolio genuinely has no such registry relationships but has nonetheless surpassed North Sound Names in size, then that’s pretty momentous. A “domainer” portfolio with actual carrying costs is quite different from a portfolio like North Sound Names, which essentially exists in order to reserve a larger number of Uniregistry domains, keeping them out of domainers’ hands.

    • Joseph Peterson says

      Actually, this may not be 1 portfolio at all. It may be a large collection of smaller portfolios, lumped under 1 registrant name. I’m seeing many different email addresses, each with a few thousand domains. Possibly, they’re all different West.cn customers.

      At least, that’s my impression after a few quick lookups.

    • Phil Buckingham says

      Joseph, I am pretty confident that Afilias is behind this . Clearly there is a registry / registrar/ registrant connection regarding its ” colour” TLDs