report .liaison gTLD deactivated

Never heard of it

Grego85 said:

Never heard of it

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https://namestat.org/liaison

A lot of these new gTLDs seem to be dropping. Most of them are brand gTLDs.

Regards...jmcc

Grego85 said:

Never heard of it

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It's a brand tld, would have never been avail to us anyways. Seems these are the only type G's being taken out.

@jmcc you could mention this in Kate's thread
https://www.namepros.com/threads/list-of-retired-new-extensions.991424/

HotKey said:

It's a brand tld, would have never been avail to us anyways. Seems these are the only type G's being taken out.

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Yep. But some of the public new gTLDs are coming up to their five year mark. That's a make or break point for TLDs.

@jmcc you could mention this in Kate's thread
https://www.namepros.com/threads/list-of-retired-new-extensions.991424/

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Just added it.

Regards...jmcc

jmcc said:

Yep. But some of the public new gTLDs are coming up to their five year mark. That's a make or break point for TLDs.

Just added it.

Regards...jmcc

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That's an interesting point about the 5 year mark for many of the Ntlds. Were the initial contract periods for a set time and then subject to renewal ? Or are we just referring to it as weigh-point

BaileyUK said:

That's an interesting point about the 5 year mark for many of the Ntlds. Were the initial contract periods for a set time and then subject to renewal ? Or are we just referring to it as weigh-point

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I dont mean talk for the talented @jmcc hosterstats, but
i interpreted it as; 5 years is when “proof of concept” is proved to be true or false, regardless of contract/s

and we all know how favorable the .com contract is..
so assume the five-year, applies with TLDs inception in 1980s, since surpassed, tho things were different then.

Samer

I know most reading this realize the following but just in case a few stumble on this thinking some investable new gTLD has gone out of business that is not the case. The .liasion TLD could only ever be used by a single company/organization as a private brand extension, it could never be invested in by a domain investor, it could never be registered by a member of the public, etc.

An analogy might help, getting a brand TLD is kind of like a company taking out an option on some property that they might plan to use in future. In many cases they later decide it is not worth it, and let it drop so they did not keep paying ICANN for the right to hold that extension. Yes they lost money on the option. But no one else did.

So don't think this is some extension people invested in, or used for their sites, and lost money on (other than the one organization that applied for it for internal use).

To my knowledge of the 700+ available new gTLD for general use only one, .wed, has gone (sort of) defunct (in process although existing registrations still being supported per ICANN process for such eventualities). That .wed extension never achieved even 500 registrations, launched with a single register onboard, and had a bizarre pricing scheme for second year. It also had competition from similar TLDs that did not have the same limitations.

Anyway, if someone tells you a new gTLD goes out of business ask them if it is a brand TLD, which was always only for private use by one organization, or a generally available new gTLD.

It may not seem like a big thing, but pretending this is another TLD deactivated hurts the entire domain industry, because it will be misinterpreted by some casual readers in the public as though a domain I might have invested went out of business and people lost money. Let's be careful in our wording, please. It is not just new gTLDs that gets hurt by misinterpretation of a brand domain decision to not use the TLD anymore.

I am not saying it is impossible that a TLD will go out of business. ICANN has procedures in place in the slight chance that will happen, and with increasing consolidation in the registry space things are probably more secure than if most were single TLD companies. I had domains at a registrar that went out of business last year. ICANN procedures protected my interests and I lost no domain as a result.

Bob

Added Note: In many cases there is even an obvious reason why the .brand is not being retained. For example in this case the brand TLD had been owned by Liasion Tecknologies , and that company was acquired by the large Canadian-based tech firm Open Text. So it makes little sense to continue to hold the old brand TLD when the former company is now merged into a larger one with a different name.

What sense to talk about the microscopic Private TLDs???

Bob Hawkes said:

Added Note: In many cases there is even an obvious reason why the .brand is not being retained. For example in this case the brand TLD had been owned by Liasion Tecknologies , and that company was acquired by the large Canadian-based tech firm Open Text. So it makes little sense to continue to hold the old brand TLD when the former company is now merged into a larger one with a different name.

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I have seen even legacy domains which were dropped due to rebranding/merging.
And those companies were not small.
So nothing to discuss here.

BaileyUK said:

That's an interesting point about the 5 year mark for many of the Ntlds. Were the initial contract periods for a set time and then subject to renewal ? Or are we just referring to it as weigh-point

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It is a waypoint for TLDs. The first year is always abnormal in terms of registrations because of the landrush but that typically lasts about six months from General Availability/Landrush. Then the daily new registrations settle down to a steadier level. The next waypoint is the Junk Dump on the anniversary of the landrush. The surprising thing is that the echo of the landrush/Junk Dump can actually be seen for up to ten years afterwards. There's a Hold'em or Fold'em way point on the third anniversary where registrants make a decision to to either develop or cut their losses. The five year waypoint is more the business/registry waypoint because of the way that the initial business plans often project the growth of a business over the first five years or so.

From a business point of view, the registrars and the market has also had a chance to become aware of the TLD so the registration and web usage and development in the TLD should, if everything is going well, have stabilised and started to grow. If the public has started to ignore the TLD, then there is an increase in abandoned sites.

This "rate of abandonment" is a very important aspect. In terms of data, the first five years of a new TLD provide registries and stats heads with enough material to see how a TLD is going to develop in the long term. It also allows for a more accurate view of which domain names are continually renewed and which are reregistrations. (Chapter 9 of the Domnomics book has the stats for COM/NET/ORG on this.) A TLD where the registrants hold on to their domain names is a better one than where most of the zone is replaced within a year (.TOP and a few of the top new gTLDs have very high levels of zone replacement where domain names are just registered for a year and then dumped.) The five year period also allows people to see if a secondary market has developed for a TLD and the prices for the resales.

I'd have to check on the registry agreements for the contract periods but I think that I've seen some for ten year periods. The .CO contract is currently up for renewal/bid. The .EU contract has also been renewed. (Think it was also a ten year contract). The legacy gTLDs contracts generally have an almost automatic renewal. The most interesting example of what can go wrong in the first five years of a new TLD's operation is that of .PRO gTLD (The details are in the free chapters of the Domnomics book (Chapter 3) on the "Look Inside" link on Amazon). Its business plan had projected millions of registrations by the fourth year of operations. It consistently failed to meet those numbers and it looked like the registry had massively over-estimated demand. The .MOBI also basically boomed and busted within the first five years and was taken over by Afilias in 2010. It launched at the start of Domain Tasting, benefited from the artificial scarcity of dropping domain names and then got clobbered by smartphones removing the mobile Web/fesktop Web screen quality barrier.

The new gTLDs have almost compressed the public-facing side of the equation in that some of them killed the landrush phase by taking all the premium domain names for themselves. That killed the buzz and free publicity created by domainers and also killed development in some of these TLDs. The problem is that domainers will keep trying to sell domain names in some of these new gTLDs not realising that development has effectively collapsed. If there's little or no development in a TLD, then there's little or no public interest in a TLD. That makes the sales process incredibly difficult because the domainer has to educate the prospective buyer on the benefits of the TLD and the domain name. The instant recognition of the benefits of owning a good COM/NET/ORG domain name is just not there.

From a purely business point of view, the five year waypoint allows people to see which key players in the registry management have moved on and whether they have been replaced by people new to the industry or industry veterans. A solid TLD is going to attract management talent. A TLD with problems is going to see good management being headhunted by other TLDs. But as a rule, the business model of a new TLD will either be validated or fail within the first five years.

Regards...jmcc

Jurgen Wolf said:

What sense to talk about the microscopic Private TLDs???

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They are irrelevant to domainers but they do indicate larger trends. Some of the brand gTLDs have used their gTLD to launch websites but most have not. There are hundreds of them that only have a few hosts in their zone files. Most of these brand owners were scared into registering their brands by Domain Tasting and clueless "consultants". By the time the new gTLDs launched, large-scale Domain Tasting was dead. Most brand owners found that they did not need the brand gTLD. The numbers of these brand gTLDs being terminated provide indications about the wider new gTLD programme.

Regards...jmcc

Over a decade .PRO was supported only by EnCirca and by few other non-significant registrars in global scale...
.PRO was really "launched" at the end of 2015 - when few major registrars were accredited and started to sell it...
GoDaddy was accredited only in Feb'2016...

And even nowadays many registrars are still NOT .PRO accredited, LCN.COM - just 1 example.
Afilias doesn't do anything. And no any business plan there, it even doesn't exist in Afilias office.

Jurgen Wolf said:

Over a decade .PRO was supported only by EnCirca and by few other non-significant registrars in global scale...
.PRO was really "launched" at the end of 2015 - when few major registrars were accredited and started to sell it...
GoDaddy was accredited only in Feb'2016...

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The .PRO has been an unlucky TLD. The assumptions in its initial business plan were quite clueless because they hadn't taken market conditions or competition into account. The rise of the ccTLDs killed it more effectively than poor management. It was also locked into a highly restrictive registry agreement. Encirca is a specialist registrar and is quite good at what it does. It focuses on niche gTLDs.

The accredited registrars thing is worrying. This is one of the metrics that I use for estimating the market penetration of TLDs. Basically the registrars and their countries will show how a gTLD is doing in countries and matching the hosters with that data and the websites by IPs will show how a gTLD is developing in various country level markets. When a gTLD is not doing well, the number of accredited registrars with more than one domain name registered starts to fall. Afilias is a strange company when it comes to marketing its TLDs. It started out with .INFO but has not been succesful with some of the new gTLDs that it launched. It has also picked up failing gTLDs. If the number of domain names in a failing gTLD is large enough, a successor registry can actually make money from the brand protection registrations that continually renew once the debt issues of the failed registry are dealt with. With .PRO and .MOBI, Afilias adopted the same discounting model to maintain some registration volume in these gTLDs. As for marketing, that's probably too expensive compared to the return on investment. It is easier to just use boom and bust discounting in the hope that some discounted domain names will actually renew. (They do.)

Regards...jmcc

Jurgen Wolf said:

Over a decade .PRO was supported only by EnCirca and by few other non-significant registrars in global scale...
.PRO was really "launched" at the end of 2015 - when few major registrars were accredited and started to sell it...
GoDaddy was accredited only in Feb'2016...

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And they were accredited only due to my own efforts... + of other domainers... No any participation of Afilias.

Regarding GoDaddy...
Their Auctions platform doesn't support .PRO even as of 2020...
They don't even auction their expires.

p.s. .PRO should be sold to any other normal operator like Donuts - and you will see the difference.