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What's the hot domain dot-news? Er, it's .news

Rightside acquires rights to new gTLD for about $10m

Domain specialist Rightside has won the fight for the generic top-level domain dot-news and will roll it out in the middle of the year.

The company acquired the rights to sell all domains ending in .news through an auction and its partner domain company Donuts – beating Amazon as well as several other specialist registry companies.

The publicly listed biz was clearly very pleased with its purchase, putting out a press release and timing the news to fit in with its earnings call for Q4 of 2014. The market was less excited, knocking its share price down more than five per cent.

Rightside would likely have been required to announce how much it had paid for dot-news (estimates put it at around $10m), but instead privately owned company Donuts won the auction and then sold the rights to Rightside for an undisclosed sum. The deal is under a confidentiality agreement, claimed the company's executives on the earnings call.

Ownership of a number of highly contested - and hence valuable - new gTLDs are being resolved at the moment thanks to the auction process run by domain name overseer ICANN.

ICANN has produced an auction timetable for new gTLDs but under its auction program, all the proceeds go to ICANN itself. That has promoted applicants for the same name to go to private auction where the proceeds are shared equally between the losing parties.

As well as dot-news, dot-box was recently resolved, going to the same company that currently runs dot-asia and beating Amazon. Likewise, dot-hair was won by L'Oreal.

The dot-news extension will "offer media outlets, journalists, radio and television personalities, and online news aggregators the opportunity to distinguish themselves with short, relevant, and memorable web addresses" according to the company. And dot-box is aimed at the cloud computing market. As for dot-hair, well, it will now be run by L'Oreal so expect to see lots of shampoo-based domains soon.

Earnings call highlights

On the earnings call, Rightside revealed that its revenue has gone up 16 per cent year-on-year, which wasn't a huge surprise given that all new gTLDs so far were launched in 2014.

Due to the acquisition of Name.com, the company's adjusted earnings before tax for 2014 was $0.6m up from a loss of $0.9m in 2013.

The companies has signed contracts to run 36 gTLDs so far, with 29 bids unresolved. On the call, its CEO and CFO said they would increase their marketing spend in 2015 and were "excited about the long-term potential" of new internet extensions - code for "disappointed with sales so far". Consumers were increasingly heading toward new top-level domains as they became more aware of them, the execs claimed.

CEO Taryn Naidu also predicted that domain prices in "horizontal" gTLDs i.e. generically named extensions would head toward dot-com prices i.e. around $6 per domain per year, whereas "vertical" TLDs would have a higher average price point. ®

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