question Does anyone know what's going on with .fans domains?

[pfj]

Pretty much everything I've tried to register is unavailable... According to NameStat there are only about 1200 domains registered, but everything seems to be unavailable. Sports teams, musicians, city names... Nothing is available to register. I was looking to try and build a few fan community sites and monetise with ads/affiliate revenue, but can't register anything good. For example, if you do a whois on realmadrid.fans is it not registered, but if you try to register it with 1and1 (cheapest for this domain) it is taken. If you do a whois on madrid.fans it's apparently being squatted by the registry but "inactive" as is real.fans and blancos.fans (team nickname). Same with rollingstones.fans and stones.fans - and pretty much anything else I've tried. LiverpoolFC.fans - no whois, but unavailable, Liverpool.fans - squatted by the registry.

Pricing is pretty high in any case ($49.99 with 1and1 but $95.99 with GoDaddy!!) so it's only big teams or musicians where it makes any sense to buy I think but does anyone know what's going on here? Any domain that would make a good fan site - which I would have thought is their strategy - is gone.

 

[mad409]

Wait for .fan, shorter.

 

[pfj]

AFter you mentioned .fan domain names I did some more research about this and it turns out that .fans and .fan are owned by the same company Asiamix Digital. On nic.fan domain there not really much info about .fan but it says that .fans has a "protected names program"

The .fans Protected Names Program offers additional protection for individuals, brands and entities from the music, sport and entertainment industries – i.e. those where fanbase is a core asset and engaging with fans is a key part of business activity. This includes artists, celebrities, clubs, sports teams, institutions and entities with registered trademarks or substantial goodwill in the relevant brands.

So I guess they aren't actually selling these domains, but they've been launched nearly a year so clearly no one else is buying either.

But when you google "dotfan" a company comes up who have been working on "UX and UI" for .fan domain names - but it looks like these are never going to be released for sale either.

"Fan Domains purchased the .fan domain name extension with plans for a number of routes to market. Alongside traditional domain name purchase, the company wished to test the market for fan-based email address services, allowing users to purchase email attached to addresses like amanda.jones @arsenal .fan or david.smith @ starwars .fan"

I don't understand this - they aren't selling .fans domains and they aren't selling .fan either..... How can this be OK with ICANN??

 

[Kate]

.fan is a nice TLD for blowing hot air
That is, until the shit hits