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Automattic Purchases .blog TLD for $19M
- wineisfine 10y agoWhy does everyone has such high hopes for ICANN go be correct and ethical? Their track record reads like the equivalent of a digital mafia. ICANN raises prices abrtrary regularly. You tell me why a .COM costs suddenly $0.22 cents more this year. It sure shouldn't be for bandwidth or storage space regarding the administration of the domain name. In fact, you would think it would become cheaper.
- Arnt 10y agoA few years ago 95% of the bandwidth was malign or useless (ie things like ddos attacks or endless looks around DNS lookups). If that's increased to 96% that'll counter any savings cheaper traffic. ICANN may not be terribly nice, but please be fair.
- FireBeyond 10y agoHuh: "How much will a .blog domain cost? While not yet finalized, domain registration prices will be in the standard range for new top-level domains, with some premium pricing for higher-value names." No longer 'first come, first served', now "How much you got?". Isn't registration supposed to be egalitarian?
- hayksaakian 10y agoit's like 'used' book sales. publishers of 'books' would prefer you buy them new so that they can collect the actual profits. they don't really earn more than 10$ per year on the sale of 'Exclusive.com' given that someone probably registered it in the 90's for 10$ and they're selling it in a private sale for thousands or millions of dollars. --- Obviously this is not amazing, if it was 'first come first serve' domain squatters would do the same thing anyways. It's not really like the 90's any more, once 'domain squatting' was invented, it doesn't really matter if you make new TLD's, there squatting will still exist on the shortest/simplest names.
- deftnerd 10y agoI've seen several "new TLD's" do this pricing scheme. Typically they come up with some kind of pricing algorithm for "premium" domains by seeing if the word is in the dictionary and how often it's used in everyday language. Things like "business.blog" will fetch a price that'll likely be in the 4 or 5 figures a year for the registrant.
- chinathrow 10y agoI hate that this is even allowed by ICANN rules.
- hsod 10y agoWhy, out of curiosity? Is first-come-first-served really any better?
- bitJericho 10y agoYeah. One you pay a million bucks for a domain, it's around 10/year after that.
- stanmancan 10y agoAt least it's fair. Part of what makes the Internet amazing is the typical cliche that anyone can come out of nowhere to disrupt huge business. This seems like a slippery slope where you have to be able to pay to play.
- staticelf 10y agoI kind of disagree, since I am young I would never have the change to register a nice, generic domain name.
- stanmancan 10y agoI'm in my late 20's and I've never had that opportunity myself either; not with the original TLD's at least. However, with these new TLD's coming out, you do have that chance, as long as the pricing is fair. If .blog is announced and it's $10 per domain, you have the same chance anyone else does to snag "gaming.blog". However, if that domain is considered "premium" and costs $10,000 to register, well... that really limits potential buyers to those that have deep enough pockets to afford it.
- ewindisch 10y ago/"Isn't registration supposed to be egalitarian?"/ Not anymore, no. There was an outcry at the creation of generic TLDs back in 2008, but it wasn't loud enough or important enough and the community lost. It didn't help that it benefits most those that would have been most powerful to stop it: large corporations.
- mseebach 10y agoWhy is "I got there first" (not to mention "I got there first and grabbed a bunch of good names") more egalitarian than selling things that are obviously more valuable for more money?
- techthroway443 10y agoWhat does it mean they purchased .blog TLD? Does this mean they bought every single domain that ends in .blog?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- hakcermani 10y agoThe registry ..
- mmastrac 10y agoThey purchased the right to issue domains under that TLD as the registrar, I believe. That means they can set and collect the price for domains registered.
- willejs 10y agoEffectively yes. Basically, they own the TLD and can sell any domains under that. So, if you want thechthrowaway.blog, you've got to pay them to purchase it. In reality, you will probably purchase this from godaddy or similar, but ultimately they own the namespace and set the price on the cost of the domains.
- bitJericho 10y agoOne way to combat this kind of thing is to just not own any domain names whose tlds are owned by private corporations.
- tobltobs 10y agoYou prefer state controlled?
- bitJericho 10y agoYes. If one country tld is unacceptable you can use a different one. There's lots of options.
- chinathrow 10y agoCharging more for some domains than others. I am disappointed.
- qyv 10y agoWhy? What intrinsically makes the value of all domains equal?
- pbhjpbhj 10y agoIntrinsically they cost less per instance for each new one registered. It's externalities - like demand, marketability, pronouncability, fashion, coincidence with trademarks - that allow them to be sold at high prices. The web has been historically very democratic and ICANN's dicking about with internet domain names is one of many things that seems to be moving increasingly away from that ideal.
- downtide 10y agoWow 19 million for a couple of characters, that are an impish abbreviation of 'web log', for virtual placeholders. Does anyone even use the word blog anymore? It sounds soo last decade. How very odd. These vanity domains just don't do it for me, and this is one of the better ones.
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago> We wanted to stay stealth while in the bidding process and afterward in order not to draw too much attention Why, because a major blog host owning the .blog TLD would appear anti-competitive?
- elahd 10y agoProbably to avoid having others enter the auction, driving the price up further.
- Artemis2 10y agoIt's not like it's a concern for ICANN, Google owns .search, .ads, .dev, .app and more.
- duskwuff 10y agoIt could be worse. Google (DBA "Charleston Road Registry") had a bid in to purchase .blog and make it only usable for Blogger (= Blogspot) blogs: > This Google Registry service causes the domain name to be associated with the Blogger service, so that DNS for second-level domains (SLD) within the TLD will automatically resolve to the relevant Google service. [...] Client-initiated updates to the name servers for the domain name will not be accepted and the server will respond with an error type 2304 - “Object status prohibits operation”. https://gtldresult.icann.org/application-result/applicationstatus/applicationdetails/527 https://gtldresult.icann.org/application-result/applications...
- andyfleming 10y agoSo would WordPress/Automattic be able to limit .blog to only be used for WordPress sites?
- ZoF 10y agoHeh, I don't know why it's at all surprising but I, for some reason, expected there to be some kind of restrictions regarding TLD ownership/providership. I really dislike this, that a single entity owns a TLD when they don't have any justification for it other than 'we bought it'. At least 99% of other TLD's are maintained by countries/orgs/etc. who at least have an arguably justified ownership. Private entities owning all TLD's here we come. Here comes the end of any potential anonymity that DNS provided.
- pietroalbini 10y agoVerisign owns both .com and .net, so that's not a new thing with gTDLs.
- jmelloy 10y agoWho do you think owns .com? All the new ones, and some of the country codes, are companies. You can't just go out tomorrow and buy a TLD - there's a whole process to prove you have the technical capabilities and financial capital to run the operation.
- ewindisch 10y agoICANN began the process for this in 2008 and the first gTLDs were sold in, I think, 2012(?). However, yes, you're right, private entities will end up owning all of the TLDs and it will put likely startups at a disadvantage to incumbents as they become more common.
- crabasa 10y agoIt's amazing that in the age of Google Search that anyone places any value on the TLD for a domain. Browser vendors have run dozens of studies that indicate that most people do not enter fully qualified domains in the address bar, which is why all address bars are wired into a search provider. I feel like the the explosion of TLDs is a very thinly veiled money grab aimed at exploiting two groups of people: 1) Trademark owners 2) Unsophisticated internet marketers
- MichaelApproved 10y agoIt still matters for email addresses.
- verandaguy 10y agoI'd argue that a TLD can add semantic meaning to a website's domain name in a more general way than what would be possible by using subdomains, and without the clutter of using /paths/to/sections/and/pages.
- seizethecheese 10y agoTLDs give a business credibility. People are much more likely to shop at foo.com than foo.info.
- hueving 10y agoBut foo isn't buying '.foo' or foo.blog. I don't see how credibility is related to the new TLDs.
- cloudjacker 10y agopeople are just as likely to click foo.co.m.ru too use whatever money you were going to use on a TLD and use it on your facebook adspend, nobody is typing in addresses anymore.
- tobltobs 10y agoMuch fun building a brand with foo.co.m.ru
- fredley 10y agoThis has made me realise I have no idea what the answer to these questions is: who did they buy it from? Where does that money go? Who mines/forges/lays new tlds?
- snuxoll 10y agoICANN.
- georgestephanis 10y agoNo, actually. The sum for the TLD. is actually split between the other bidders for that gTLD. So if you had applied to bid, and lost out on .blog, you would have gotten an equal share of the money that Automattic paid to be the owner of the TLD.
- pbhjpbhj 10y agoWho can basically make new TLDs whenever, can't they? At no real cost to themselves. By what authority to they derive that privilege, why are they allowed to make such huge sums without doing anything useful for the money?
- mindslight 10y agoDNS admins who use the standard root.hints -> owners of those IP blocks -> administrators of those servers. It's essentially the same attention-consensus-economy game that web startups do, but earlier, more primitive, and deeper. They're now arbitraging the trust which got them to this point.
- 55555 10y agoThe US government. Someone else will be able to explain. I just read a bunch about it and am still extremely confused.
- r3bl 10y agoI'll just leave this quote: > The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the private sector, non-profit corporation
- wineisfine 10y agoHooray! More Wordpress websites
- robalfonso 10y agoHow this process actually works is you apply to carry a gTLD (ie .blog) this application fee costs $185,000. If no one else applies for the same string, you are good to go. If they do there is an auction. The auction works like this. N parties participate and must provide an escrow account (to bid in good faith) they may bid up to what they want (and whats in escrow) and the winning bid pays out to the auctioneer (a minor fee) and the losing parties. IE 3 parties to this auction (making this up) automattic - 19 million paid Party 1 - 9.5 million earned Party 2 - 9.5 million earned You are essentially paying off your competition to go away. There are some other details and this was the initial process a few years ago, I have not heard if there are any significant adjustments now.
- vmasto 10y agoAny idea how this process manages abuse? What prevents me from bidding just $500,000 (if I had $500,000) to a TLD that I know is popular just to make money from the winner?
- curried_haskell 10y agoDid you read? The fact that you pay a $185,000 fee first. And then in order to make your $500,000 bid, you have to put that money in escrow. And then, you might accidentally remain the highest bidder and lose all that money in exchange for your shiny new tld.
- markdown 10y ago$685,000 for .blog is a steal. Companies have paid millions for single domains. It was a very safe bet. Sounds ripe for abuse if you ask me. On top of that, think about how many people inside Automattic knew about their bid. The board at least. Any one of those people could have told a friend that WP was going to bid for it. Would you not have instantly put in a small bid of $200,000 if you'd known about this and had the cash?
- xorcist 10y ago
- beedogs 10y agoNeat: a new way to waste 19 million dollars. Silicon Valley just keeps innovating.
- flashman 10y agoI would assign anything hosted on .blog a huge reputational hit. But the fact that so much money was put behind it makes me think of two possibilities: 1) Auttomatic has far more money than sense, or 2) I am out of touch with the way other internet users assign value to domain names. It's entirely possible that the second one is true. I've been using the internet for twenty years now, so I really have no idea how meaningful other people find particular gTLDs.
- adevine 10y agoI think that in your head you're comparing this to buying a single domain name, e.g. playing 19 mil for blog.com or something, but it reality Auttomatic is really paying to be the registrar for .blog domains. I can imagine a lot of reasonable people paying $19 a year for a myname.blog website.
- ValentineC 10y ago> I can imagine a lot of reasonable people paying $19 a year for a myname.blog website. Why would a reasonable person do that when they can do something similar with blog.myname.com (and the like)? I don't know how the new TLDs have been perceived, but I certainly would prefer a nice sounding myname.com than a website on any of these newfangled names.
- scurvy 10y agoWell they have raised over $190M, and I don't see them spending it on marketing like Wix, Squarespace, Weebly, and GoDaddy. At least I haven't seen any ads or anything. Maybe this is their marketing budget?
- gesman 10y agoIs it possible to create 2-letter TLD's instead of .mycoolbutreallystupidtld or just plain .bullshit TLD's? There are plenty of unused 2-letter TLD combos around, why bother with .blahblah ?
- kijeda 10y agoAll unused two letter combinations are reserved for country-code top-level domains. This is to ensure future countries have the ability to have their own TLD. New countries are created perhaps more often than you may think, on average about one per year or two.
- phantom_oracle 10y agoI recall a while back that based on this new TLD scheme, it was mentioned that ICANN pocketed a tidy +USD100M from it. What ICANN needs this money for, I'm not sure...
- return0 10y agoThis also means that automattic can take down your .blog if they don't like you.
- frontendthing 10y agoA blogpost should follow similar to this: "Hey, I am Matt, I just wasted 19 M Dollars to buy a TLD. I know, this is plain disgusting and it feels like a kick in the face of humanity, so I decided to spend another 190 M Dollars to pay the medical costs for children with heavy health problems to parents who can not afford the health care. Another 190 M I will spend to send medical equipment to Syria and help to rebuild the hospitals that have been destroyed by US bombs. If you have more ideas on how to spend my money usefully, please fill out that form..." Of course he will write much better english than me.
- pc86 10y agoWhy is it disgusting? He has the money. He wanted to spend it on that. Scale be damned, it's no different than spending $150k on a car or $5 million on a house. Stop insisting that people should spend their own money in a certain way.
- frontendthing 10y agoYou lost your moral compass and an ethical and responsible view of the world - this is a serious mental health problem and can be healed by love. It is not "your money" and it is not "your planet" and it is not about "you you you". You are living here on planet earth just as a guest. Of course you can choose, how to behave.
- shaqbert 10y agoWhat is wrong with wordpress.com? Is that the best use of funds? Why not put at least 1/10th of that money into just providing a sliver of love to their big breadwinner Wordress VIP?
- petervandijck 10y agoThey should send a bottle of wine to Peter Merholz :) http://www.peterme.com/archives/00000205.html http://www.peterme.com/archives/00000205.html