A decade ago on this day ICANN approved the .xxx extension. Stuart Lawley and his ICM Registry realized a dream. The controversial extension that found resistance from all sides including, adult performers and studios, they had concerns that adult or xxx rated content could eventually be relegated to only the .xxx extension. Countries and continents were not happy.
Mainstream celebrities had to worry about defensive registrations. Now some like Beyonce got their name blocked or reserved, others like Brandy did not.
Brad Pitt reserved, Ryan Reynolds not reserved.
Some sports celebrities like Jennie Finch and Hope Solo were not on the reserved list. But two of the most famous pornstars of all time were reserved. Tera Patrick and Jenna Jameson.
Universities
Universities paid out to protect their names in .xxx. One example is the University of Missouri.
The University of Missouri acquired Missouri.xxx, mizzou.xxx and missouritigers.xxx . I think the Missouri purchase is interesting as being the pure geo and not representing just the school. I am sure many would like the state.xxx domain.
Missouri.xxx is currently available, Mizzou.xxx is registered until December of 2020. missouritigers.xxx is available.
The University of Illinois took the opposite approach. They registered no names. Put out a statement:
Chief information security officer Mike Corn says the school will instead threaten cyber-squatters with legal action. University lawyers will send cease-and-desist letters to anyone it feels is violating trademarks.
Numbers
In December of 2011 .XXX tweeted out, 159,351 .XXX domains sold – 55,367 in the first day!
Frank Schilling
ICM registry put out a release, part of that included mention of Frank Schilling:
Frank Schilling, owner of possibly the world’s largest portfolio of domain names, had never previously participated in any other new TLD launch. However, Schilling excitedly negotiated a deal with ICM Registry for some premium generic domain names such as live.xxx, hot.xxx and free.xxx in a seven figure deal out of the nearly $4 million that ICM Registry has received during this Founders program period. Schilling is now partnering with other notable adult companies to develop impressive new sites, ultimately contributing to the increased value of the adult eco-system.
SALES
Gay.xxx sold for $500,000 (coming soon page)
Clips4Sale Buys $700K In .XXX Domains
Mobile.xxx sold for $160,000 (does not resolve)
Tube.xxx and Tubes.xxx sells for $750,000.
Teen.xxx sold for $400,000
More Adult extensions
ICM Registry got the rights to .Sex, .Adult and .Porn. In 2014 they announced a matching program.
The Domain Matching Program will allow .XXX stakeholders to register any available directly matching second level names in .PORN or .ADULT, before those names are offered to the general public.
The Domain Matching Program will also be available to trademark owners that successfully applied during .XXX’s Sunrise B program.
The Domain Matching Program is explained in greater detail at http://www.icmregistry.com/programs/gtlds/ and http://www.icmregistry.com/about/policies/domain-matching-program/.
Acquisition
Minds and Machines (MMX) acquired ICM Registry LLC in May of 2018.
It was announced today that Minds and Machines (MMX), the respected Top Level Domain (TLD) portfolio operator that is listed on the London Stock Exchange’s AIM market under symbol MMX.L, has acquired the entire ownership of ICM Registry LLC for a combination of cash and shares.
There has been increasing consolidation in the TLD operator market and ICM’s stable of highly profitable domain extensions attracted several offers from rival portfolio operators.
Stuart Lawley, the outgoing CEO of ICM, said, “Having successfully built and sold several technology businesses throughout my career in other consolidating markets, it became clear over the last few years that ICM’s business, shareholders and employees would be best served as part of a larger group with the corresponding resources, vision, opportunities and obvious cost savings that would bring.”
ICM’s 4 TLDs will be added to MMX’s portfolio of 28 extensions, which currently have over 1.4 M registrations.
With the exception of Lawley who is leaving to pursue blockhain based Age Verification business opportunities with his new business AVSecure.com, the rest of the existing management team will remain with ICM. Back end registry services will continue to be provided by Afilias, who has been a shareholder in ICM and will now become a sizeable and welcome shareholder in MMX going forwards.
Lawley went on to say, “I strongly believe ICM’s shareholders, customers and employees will be well served by this acquisition; MMX has a very dynamic management team. We received 4 offers in total for the business, some all cash and others a mixture of cash and stock. After lengthy, detailed negotiations and due diligence with the interested parties, the arrangement with MMX was clearly the best fit.”
As a sign of ICM’s confidence in MMX, post completion Stuart Lawley will become the largest shareholder in MMX with a holding just over 15% and as part of the transaction, the 5 remaining senior managers of ICM will all have meaningful stock holdings in MMX.
Read full release here
It’s been quite the decade, but with so many new gtlds in existence, .xxx seems an afterthought in 2020.
Disclosure: visiting .xxx names is certainly NSFW do not view at work or shared networks.
Now that’s an article, well done. It’s hard to imagine all the money spent on those names. Gay.xxx has a landing page $500K for a landing page? Don’t get me started on the colleges, idiots.
It has been 10 years already??? Where does the time go?
Does schilling still own some .xxx?
A scare tactic to get the adult industry to pay up which ultimately failed to do so. i had a handful of .xxx domains that were good one word but let them all drop. there is no one buying these basically. Especially now.
In the scheme of things, 10 years is not really a long time. At least not to me anyway. I am age 68. I can tell you first hand that the older you get in life, the faster time flies by. As a kid, 10 years seemed like a long time to me! Now, at my age, 10 years goes by like a blink of the eye. I don’t not know much about .xxx or do I care to know. I am kinda wondering about the registration stats on .xxx . If in the year 2011 159,000 .xxx were registered and 55,000 of those .xxx were sold! Do you mean by sold, they were registered? And 55,000 were registered the first day? I am simply wondering if 55,000 were registered on day one, then what ere the number of refs on day two, three and so on? Did the registration sales simply just fall off a cliff? I sometimes look at what prices the newer TLD’s are selling for at first year reg fee, versus the Renewal fee years after. Are these TLD registration sellers out of their minds??? I just searched availability of the domain name at random ( Edith.xxx ) it is available at a price of $99.99 annually with renewal of $99.99. Are they out of their friggin minds? The web in so over Saturated now with this garbage, .com, .net, .co, .me, etc… buy an .xxx for ( $99.00 ) ? .xxx has their slutty work cut out for them. Good luck you idiots! There are litterly 1000’s upon thousands of of porn sites world wide , not only with the .com’s, net’s and so on, but even .CC jumping on board with domain extensions ! It’s simply a cluster F ** k. I will be dead and long gone before .xxx becomes profitable. I only want to see naked angels in heaven
floating around with wings. LoL with the TLD. .God or .Heaven. 😇
Pretty sure .xxx has been seeing zero or negative growth for a long time (which likely promoted the sale). Seems like a lot of defensive registrations and very little actual usage.
According to Namebio.com the highest sale in the last 3 years is $620 for play.xxx so values sure have changed. Pretty typical performance for a new ltd where the peak is first few years.
.xxx does not deserve an article at all. It is a 100% flop venture, whosoever bought the names were unable to sell them at a profit, most were dropped in the first year of registration. Today no one is interested to buy even one word names in .xxx extension because of high registration fees and renewal fees and too much restrictions.
Back then they asked to meet with me and my brother. Stuart was very nice and offered us the dotXXX for some of our Geodomains like PalmSprings.com and LagunaBeach.com. I declined and explained that, politically, it was the worst thing we could do. Our media opponents in those respective cities would’ve had a field day.
It also bothered me that there seemed to be an unspoken “blackmail” factor in some of their sales, especially to colleges and universities.
He wasn’t being nice and the names weren’t “free”. You would have spent a couple of thousand on renewals by now on names that hold no value.
I’m sure he was offering the same thing to as many people as he could find.
Honestly, I wasn’t even thinking that far ahead during the conversation. I didn’t know who he was until after we sat down (they approached us at a domain conference).