ICM has just launched a directory for developed .XXX sites under XXX.XXX

The site features 145 sites each getting a small banner with a click through to each site.

The directory is also accepting additional sites for listing.

If you own a developed .XXX site you can submit it to the registry through a form located on the 1st page of the xxx.xxx site…

ICM filed a motion to dismiss Manwin’s complaint for Anti-Trust on the .XXX extension for a second time yesterday. (You can read the motion to dismiss again here).

Here are some of the highlights of the Motion to Dismiss:

“”Even though it is their second try, Plaintiffs’ First Amended Complaint fails to state a claim and should be dismissed.”

“The Amend Complaint is (like the original Complaint) nothing more than a transparent attempt to use the antitrust laws to eliminate a new internet platform for adult content—.XXX—that Plaintiff Manwin perceives as posing unwelcome competition to its dominant .com adult-entertainment empire.”

“Indeed, Plaintiffs’ various antitrust theories not only fail to allege the requisite elements of Plaintiffs’ claims for relief, they are also internally inconsistent.”

“For example, Plaintiffs contend that ICM and ICANN were conspiring to eliminate competition for the establishment of adult-oriented TLDs and .XXX registry services, notwithstanding the Amended Complaint’s detailed recitation of the long and frustrating history of ICM’s efforts to secure approval for the .XXX Top-Level Domain Name (“TLD”), including repeated ICANN rejections of its application and the apparent absence of interest from any other bidders.”

“Similarly, the Amended Complaint makes clear that Plaintiffs’ real concern is with the competition to their .com websites that may be posed by rivals offering adult content via .XXX domain names—a business in which neither ICM nor ICANN participates. But this is not a concern of the antitrust laws, which have long been held to protect the competitive process and not the profit streams of individual firms.”

“The proposed remedy for these purported violations further exposes the baselessness of Plaintiffs’ claims and their ulterior motives in bringing this action. Unable to show any damages from the challenged conduct, Manwin and Digital Playground instead seek sweeping, inconsistent and unsupportable injunctive relief.”

“Unfortunately for Plaintiffs, under the Supreme Court’s most recent formulation of the pleading standard in antitrust cases, they must do more than merely assert the existence of Sherman Act violations to get past a Rule (b) motion.

“Given the absence of factual allegations plausibly suggesting the existence of antitrust injury, standing, any unlawful ICM-ICANN agreement, or even unilateral anticompetitive conduct, the Amended Complaint must be dismissed.”

“Plaintiff Manwin Licensing International, S.à.r.l. (“Manwin”) is a business headquartered in Luxembourg that “owns and licenses the trademarks and domain names used for many of the most popular adult-oriented websites,” including YouPorn.com (“YouPorn”), the single most popular free adult video website on the Internet.…

The ICANN monthly reports are out for January and .XXX now has 119K registered domain names.

In December, the ICANN report showed .XXX 106,500 registrations.

In the January report the total number of pure registered .XXX domain names is 119,029.

These figures do NOT include those domain names registered by trademark holders under the “block” program (Sunrise B)

The block program was whereby Trademark holders could apply to pay a one time fee to block a domain for 10 year.

These figures also do NOT include, domain names ICM reserved for future sales or use,  ICANN ordered reserved domains and domains of celebrities and sensitive issue domains which are permanently reserved by the registry.

ICM Registry sponsor of the .XXX TLD has already announced they have applied for .sex, .porn and .adult as well.…

The most popular posts on DNN in April of 2012 by web traffic were:

1. XXX Goes Live in the Root Servers (04|15|2011)
2. Joichi Ito Joins Tucows Board (12|15|2008)
3. Frank Schilling’s InternetTraffic.com now powers 1,500,000+ domains (04|19|2012)
4. Will Marchex Sell iPanel.com to Apple? (04|05|2012)
5. First Brannans Domain Auction by Clements brothers yields $34,000 ( 04|09|2012)
6. Google settles Dispute over gmail.de after 8 years (04|16|2012)
7. Internet.bs Corp Responds to KnujOn Accusations (04|09|2012)
8. Keep Playing the Music . . . Really, The Ship’s Not Sinking (02|22|2008)
9. LeadRefs Announcing New Version of Domain Sales Lead Generation Tool (04|16|2012)
10. ICANN Issues additional statement regarding new TLD Application System Bug (04|14|2012)

Related posts:

• Most Popular Articles on DNN for January 2010
• CEO Rod Beckstrom to Leave ICANN in 2012
• DOMAINfest Global 2012 to Introduce Fantasy Domaining Contest
• Internet.bs Corp Responds to KnujOn Accusations
• This Week In Domains (week 17/2012)

DNN recently analyzed the top 1,000,000 most heavily trafficked and popular websites in the world, according to Alexa, and the results were shocking when we specifically looked at the now 1 year old active dot XXX extension. Our research revealed that only 61 developed websites that are using the .XXX extension placed inside the top 1 million of the most visited sites in the world. Many would expect these adult-oriented websites to be pulling in massive amounts of traffic and interest soon after launching, but apparently that isn’t the case so far.

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

Stuart Lawley the CEO of ICM Registry who operates the .XXX TLD had an interview on Bloomberg TV on Friday to chat not only about .XXX but its  application to run multiple new gTLD’s. (You can watch the interview here)

“We have nearly 250,000 .XXX domain names under management, our 5 year forecasts were 125,000-150,000, so in 4 or 5 months of operations we have achieved our 5 year goal, so it has gotten off to a great start.” Lawley told Bloomberg.

“Out of the 200,000 and odd number of registrations, around 60K were defensive registrations, people like Bloomberg registered Bloomberg.xxx, and the other 130,000 or so,  are adult in nature”

The Bloomberg interviewer asked Lawley,

“In what way aren’t these new names some level of extortion where company’s that don’t want anything to do with this have to buying protection?”

“That’s why we applied for .sex, .porn and .adult, so a company like Bloomberg doesn’t have to buy Bloomberg.sex, Bloomberg.porn and/or Bloomberg.adult,  which they clearly don’t want or need, so we are allocating those names, putting them on the shelf forever at no charge, we are doing that for also for the adult domains as well.   That’s why we applied for .sex, porn and .adult as a service to our existing registrants to spare them from any extra expense.”

“Any domain that is registered or reserved in .XXX, all 250,000 of them  in, will be  automatically and permanently, placed in the reserved list for .sex, .porn or .adult for the benefit of the .XXX holder.”

The basic message is register your .xxx now and you will get the matching name in .sex, .porn and .adult for free later.

Of course what Mr. Lawley didn’t say and wasn’t asked, is that there is no guarantee that a .sex, .porn and/or .adult will even be approved by ICANN with the expected objection of the GAC.

Moreover even if ICANN does approve a .sex, porn and/or .adult there is no guarantee that ICM will win the extension.

There could definitely be other applications for one or more of these extensions which may wind up in a bidding war.

Stuart is a very smart guy, but personally I would feel uncomfortable using the possible new extensions as a selling point for .XXX without at least a disclaimer that they might not be approved and there maybe other applicants for them and ICM may not win one or all of the extensions.…

The ICM Registry, the operator for the .XXX top-level domain (TLD)  announced it made application for the new gTLD’s in SEX, .PORN and .ADULT.

According to the press release issues this morning if ICM were to get any or all of the new extensions the owner of the matching .XXX domain would be given a grandfather right to acquire the matching name in the new extension.

Here is the balance of the press release:

“ICM Registry has worked for more than a decade to create .XXX which has become a globally accepted and responsible place for adult online entertainment to thrive in an easily recognizable self-regulated environment,” said Stuart Lawley, CEO of ICM Registry. “We are dedicated to protecting interested stakeholders by providing the latest technology and the best domains which is why we created the .XXX TLD. We chose to submit applications for additional TLDs to spare .XXX participants from needless expense and to ensure the TLDs will be run in the same trustworthy and appropriate ways that .XXX is today.”

If awarded these new TLDs, ICM Registry is offering an unprecedented “grandfathering” clause and will automatically reserve matching names at no cost for those who already have .XXX domains. .XXX registrants can chose to do nothing and the matching names will never be released under the new TLD suffixes. If however, registrants choose to register the new names for use, there will be a nominal fee. This means .XXX domain holders can potentially triple their exposure and value of their holdings, while brand and trademark holders who own .XXX domain names are automatically protected and will not have to register for the new domain names.

“ICM Registry has invested just under two million dollars in these applications to support our existing customers,” said Lawley. “By offering the grandfathering clause at no charge, we are demonstrating our commitment to our adult entertainment community and will not collect fees for this from anyone who already has purchased a .XXX domain by the appropriate cut-off date.”

Each of these applications may face opposition from members of the Government Advisory Council (GAC).  Although some governments expressed opposition at various times to ICM’s application to run the .XXX registry, members of the GAC have much stronger power under the new gTLD program than they did under the rules in effect when ICM applied.

It will be interesting to see if Manwin who has sued ICM over the .XXX extension for anti-trust will make application for any of these three extensions as well or any other “adult” oriented extension.…

The monthly ICANN Registry reports are now live for December and it shows that ICM registry the owners of the .XXX extension registered 106,549 domain names in its first month of operation.

This 106,549 does NOT include those domain names registered by trademark holders under the “block” program (Sunrise B).

I reached out to ICM yesterday once the report came out for some more recent numbers.

ICM told me as of yesterday, April 3rd, there are currently 132,859 paid .XXX (normal) registrations not including the TM blocks.

Including Trademark Holders that registered a .XXX domain under the 10 year block program; plus domain names ICM reserved for future sales or use,  ICANN ordered reserved domains and domains of celebrities and sensitive issue domains which are permanently reserved by the registry, there are 215,835 .XXX domains under ICM’s management.

Not surprisingly, the largest registrar in the world Godaddy.com led the way in terms of normal .XXX registrations in December (NOT including Blocks).

More surprisingly is that  NetworkSolutions.com had the 2nd highest number of registrations by far.

Here is a break down of which registrars got the registrations for .XXX in December:

It seems that the cost of registering a .XXX domain name is going on sale for a limited time at just a few registrars.

Moniker.com just announced it was reducing the price of a .XXX registration from $98 to $69 from only Match 26th- April 9th a 30% savings.

According to a press release this morning, EuroDns.com is reducing the price to 29,99 Euro’s, which is around $40 but when I went to the URL it directed me to in the email, the normal price of $98.77 was still showing.

If the EuroDNS press release is accurate it would be a savings of about 60%.

If I receive any more emails or info from registrars that are participating in the sale, I will add it to the comment section below

 …

According to a Press release we just received from ICM Registry, the company behind the new .XXX Top Level Domain, they just announced today “details of the highly anticipated Adult Performer Program, which releases more than 3,500 .XXX domain names that were initially held in reserve to protect the individual name interests of performers and personalities within the adult entertainment industry.”

Here is the rest of the Press release

“We recognized early on that a significant portion of the core success of the adult industry lies with its performers,” said Vaughn Liley, Sales Director for ICM Registry. “We also became aware that performers do not often have registered trademarks, nor do they retain legal representation to protect their ‘trade name.’ The Adult Performers Program was born from the desire to make a conscious effort to protect these individuals who are truly at the core of the adult entertainment community,” Liley continued.

“We offered a similar and unprecedented protection for existing adult domain owners as a part of our Sunrise A program in September and October of last year. We feel that these programs, along with our Rapid Evaluation Service (RES) dispute resolution policies, are a positive step toward protecting against infringement as well as a deterrent to would be cybersquatters,” he added.

“The Adult Performer Program verification process is now available to 3500+ performers and personalities whose names have been reserved in anticipation of this program. These names will be released only to performers and personalities who express their interest at http://www.about.xxx/performers and complete a simple identity verification process and affidavit. Performers and personalities with more questions about the program can contact performers@icmregistry.com.”

“In conjunction with Name.com, these names are already pre-paid for the first twelve months (until February 3, 2013) and performers can either maintain the domains at Name.com or, if they prefer, transfer them to the registrar of their choice in the usual way.”

““At Name.com, we love creative ideas that benefit everybody involved”, said Jared Ewy, Name.com’s Community Evangelist. “ICM Registry’s Adult Performer Program is a brilliant way to promote .XXX within the industry, while increasing web traffic and protecting adult performers. As a domain registrar, we’ll support these domains with our world class customer support, security and 24/7 monitoring, so industry talent can rest easy that more traffic won’t mean more problems–just more business with .XXX and Name.com.”

“ICM Registry had the opportunity to verify Teagan Presley, the multiple AVN Award winning Adam & Eve contract star, during a recent live appearance where she became the first performer to be verified through the program and will be awarded the rights to www.teaganpresley.xxx.…