One year later… Now what?

The .XXX extension, a sponsored top level domain operated by ICM Registry has been live for a year now, as was originally reported on April 15, 2011, which is when .XXX was added to the root servers and domains such as Sex.XXX and Porn.XXX were now resolving as live sites on the web, readily available to be accessed as any other extension, all over the world. Dot XXX domain names have been available for anyone to register and develop since December 6, 2011, after the sunrise and landrush phases concluded which were held from September 7 – November 25, 2011. The registry operator also recently announced that it will be applying for the .Sex, .Adult and .Porn TLDs.

Earlier this month ICANN and the ICM Registry released .XXX domain registration stats and the magic number was said to be 215,835. That number represents how many .XXX domains ICM Registry had under its management as of April 6, 2012 when the press release went out. Out of all those registrations 132,859 are adult-oriented and a whopping 82,976 are non-adult defensive registrations, domains of celebrities and sensitive uses, and those ICM Registry reserved for future uses and sales under the .XXX Premium Names Program and the .XXX Adult Performer Program.

Stuart Lawley, the founder and CEO of ICM Registry LLC was interviewed by DomainSherpa about two weeks ago, where he shared some interesting data about the .XXX extension during the 1 hour video interview with Michael Cyger. We’ve highlighted below the few bits and pieces which stand out the most:

• Currently .XXX is averaging 125 – 150 new registrations per day
• $25 million in revenues in the 4th quarter for ICM Registry
• Around 132,000 are normal registrations, which they classified as “recurring revenue domains”
• Actual number of “built out sites” that they are aware of and can acknolwedge is 27,555 at this point

Lawley went on to highlight some of the most expensive and “premium” triple X domains sold to date, which were Gay.XXX for $500,000, Fetish.XXX for $300,000, Shemales.XXX for $200,000, Toys.XXX for $125,000, Sexy.XXX for $100,000, Dating.XXX for $100,000, FootFetish.XXX for $89,000. In a more recent interview with Bloomberg just this past weekend Lawley mentioned that they also just sold Movies.XXX for $100,000.

Lack of any “real” developments…

Now it’s only been approximately 5 month’s that the general public have had the opportunity to freely register any available .XXX domain that they desire, at any one of their favorite domain registrar’s such as Go Daddy or Register.com for example, and then be able to immediately develop their domain in any way they choose.  We would not have thought that only 61 domains in total would be ranking inside the top 1,000,000 most visited sites in the world. That number was suppose to be exponentially higher by all accounts even a few month’s in, which we now are well into 2012, however reality says otherwise.

It is still very early on in the game as some would argue for this year old extension, but the numbers and data which DNN uncovered speak for itself as far as development of these newly available domains go. The concrete data shows that there is a huge disconnect somewhere. For the ICM Registry and hopeful .XXX domain investors that have spent $80 – $100 on average per registration, it is nothing really to get overly excited about, so far into this journey.

Many .XXX domains have been registered at this point, that is old news already. Some have been developed of course, most commonly as YouTube style video portals serving up adult content. Very few of the sites using the DOT XXX extension are taking off though and generating the buzz and activity that a website requires in order to become profitable and a success over the long run.

This begs the question, does the new .XXX extension really help you if you are running an adult oriented website, or is it going to do just the opposite and backfire at a certain point, and hurt your online image, website traffic, etc.? Well established companies from the adult industry and the thousands of TGP/Tube/Freebie adult site operators don’t seem to be rushing to switch over their existing sites to the newly available .XXX domains.

About Alexa.com website and Alexa stats

Alexa.com is the leading provider of free, global web metrics. Alexa’s website ranks over 30 million of the most popular websites worldwide. The global panel of data comes from millions of toolbar users from all parts of the world which were created by more than 25,000 publishers. In-depth coverage and data is provided from more than 125 countries in North America, South America, Asia and Europe. Alexa.com is owned and operated by Alexa Internet, Inc. which is a California-based subsidiary company of Amazon.

Say what you say about Alexa’s rankings, but the bottom line is that it’s good to have them, as they provide a closer look at millions of sites and their traffic data. Many people swear by these numbers and it is their go-to resource for website intelligence, while other industry insiders and “professional” internet marketers say that the rankings are not very accurate and in certain cases may be misleading because they are not directly measured. At the end of the day, it depends on who you ask. One thing that can’t be argued is that the stats are useful and provide many insights that no other website or service does for free.

.XXX has a long way to go…

For those wondering about some comparisons, we’ve got that for you too. It’s been two years since the .CO extension was re-launched, making a huge splash within the domainer community and generating a ton of buzz in the mainstream world. The “hip and new” ccTLD which is operated by .CO Internet S.A.S  has been unrestricted (available for anybody to register throughout the world) since July of 2011, and it currently has 1,367 domains inside the top 1,000,000 according to Alexa.com.

More than half of the sites found in Alexa’s comprehensive ranking of the top 1,000,000 sites in the world are using the dot COM (.com) extension, 542,769 sites to be exact.

It’s highly unlikely, without a major paradigm shift, that .XXX or any other newly introduced extension in the near future will ever dominate Alexa’s list. Other new gTLD extensions that plan to roll out an extension targeting a niche (like .xxx) or a broader-based audience (like .co) should take heed of the growth patterns evident here and plan accordingly.

See the list of ranking .CO and .XXX domains after the jump.

Alexa top .XXX Domains

Alexa Ranking for .CO Domains

Related posts:

• ICM Registry confirms new TLD applications for .Sex, .Adult and .Porn
• Free Speech Coalition Announces Plans for .xxxxx New TLD
• .XXX TLD To Be Approved Tomorrow?
• Adult Trade Organization to Lobby Against .XXX sTLD at ICANN Meeting
• Penthouse Purchases Adult Friend Finder

See the full press release after the jump.

Related posts:

• .ME Receives Over 30,000 Applications
• Hunting Moon Adult Domain Auction Ends today
• Adult Trade Organization to Lobby Against .XXX sTLD at ICANN Meeting
• Penthouse Purchases Adult Friend Finder
• Minds + Machines Confirms Participation in dotRadio TLD Application

[Update] As Kevin over at DomainIncite points out in his post on the same topic, the registry website, sex.xxx and porn.xxx (both placeholder pages, safe for work) are now resolving under the new TLD. xxx.xxx is resolving as well.

The delegation record for the new TLD can now also be found on the IANA website.

Below the output of the dig query:

dig ns xxx.

;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER< <- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 22036
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 6, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;xxx.				IN	NS

;; ANSWER SECTION:
xxx.			300	IN	NS	a2.xxx.afilias-nst.info.
xxx.			300	IN	NS	a0.xxx.afilias-nst.info.
xxx.			300	IN	NS	b2.xxx.afilias-nst.org.
xxx.			300	IN	NS	b0.xxx.afilias-nst.org.
xxx.			300	IN	NS	c0.xxx.afilias-nst.info.
xxx.			300	IN	NS	d0.xxx.afilias-nst.org.

See the IANA record after the jump

Delegation Record for .XXX

(Sponsored top-level domain)

Sponsoring Organisation

ICM Registry LLC
PO Box 30129
Palm Beach Gardens Florida 33420
United States

Administrative Contact

Chief Operating Officer
ICM Registry LLC
PO Box 30129
Palm Beach Gardens Florida 33420
United States
Email: rking@icmregistry.com
Voice: +1 561 290 0624
Fax: +1 561 658 8144

Technical Contact

Domain Technical Contact
ICM Registry LLC
PO Box 30129
Palm Beach Gardens Florida 33420
United States
Email: domaintech@afilias.info
Voice: +1 801 647 1705
Fax: +1 801 542 8084

(c) 2011 DomainNameNews.com (9)

The board would then enter the contract negotiations with application ICM Registry and then refer the contract to the Governmental Advisory Committee since they had raised concerns in the past.

This decision would ignore the lobbying of the adult industry against the new extension, however the registry might have some challenges selling domains under the new TLD.

(c) 2010 DomainNameNews.com

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“I am honored to be going to Brussels with Diane,” said Hymes, who traveled to Wellington in 2005 for the same purpose. “The fact that so much time has gone by has done nothing to diminish the dangers posed by dot XXX. Yes, it should never have been resurrected from the dead in the first place, but it was and now we need to be there, reminding the ICANN Board and staff at every turn that dot XXX has no industry support, and also that the last thing in the world they want to be is the ultimate arbiter of a policy-setting IFFOR (International Foundation for Online Responsibility). Believe me, that scenario would be hell on earth for ICANN.”

Diane had already spoken against the release of the .XXX sTLD at the 2007 ICANN meeting in Lisbon, Portugal, where the ICANN board rejected the application by ICM registry. ICM had then asked ICANN to have an independent review panel look over the decision. The review panel concluded that ICANN should not have rejected the application after first approving it. The decision was tabled again, but delayed at the 37th ICANN meeting in Nairobi, Kenya earlier this year in order to ask the public for additional comments.

Conservative oriented organizations have been speaking out against introducing a .XXX extension as well as the adult industry.

[via AVN]

(c) 2010 DomainNameNews.com

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(c) 2009 DomainNameNews.com

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