IT.COM

domains Monte Cahn Partners to Create Dot Hip Hop Extension

Spaceship Spaceship
Watch

Lox

____Top Member
Impact
12,347
The partnership consists of Cahn Enterprises, Inc. (Monte Cahn), JJN Solutions, LLC (Jeffrey Neuman), and Digital Asset Monetary Network (“DigitalAMN”) (Ajene Watson).

Monte brings a wealth of talent and years of experience to Dot Hip Hop, LLC. He is the founder and former CEO of the ICANN Accredited Registrar Moniker.com, former President of SnapNames.com and former Sr. VP of DomainSponsor.com. Monte pioneered the domain name aftermarket where domain names are traded, bought and sold, created the first domain live and online auction platform, developed whois privacy, and escrow/appraisal services. Monte Cahn is currently the President/Director of RightOfTheDot, LLC which specializes in premium domain name and digital asset sales, brokerage, consulting, and auctions. RightOfTheDot is also a leader in consulting for businesses and individuals seeking to establish and manage new gTLDs.

Jeffrey Neuman, the Founder and CEO of JJN Solutions, is a distinguished Internet, IP and Entertainment Attorney, who has been actively involved in the domain name industry for nearly 25 years. He was involved in the original creation of ICANN, the development of the Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) and has chaired a number of Working Groups and committees within the ICANN Community, including those involving the administration, operation and implementation of gTLD Registries and Registrars. Before forming JJN Solutions, he served as an executive at Com Laude, one of the leading corporate domain name registrars, responsible for oversight over all of its business in North America. Prior to that, Jeff spent 15 years as a Vice President at Neustar, Inc. initially responsible for overseeing all legal and policy aspects of its Enterprise Services division, and then was promoted to lead Neustar’s domain name registry business during the years of the largest expansion of the Internet domain name space.

New to the Domain Name space is Ajene Watson, co-founder and CEO of DigitalAMN, a company focused on meeting the economic and educational needs of the underserved within the financial markets and entrepreneurship. A Bronx native (the birthplace of Hip Hop), Ajene is an early-stage investor and business manager-development consultant with 20 years of experience in the financial markets. He also has an entertainment background and brings a wealth of knowledge and contacts from the Hip Hop community.

Scott Pruitt of RightOfTheDot also joins the team as the Director of Marketing. Scott has worked with Monte for several years promoting RightOfTheDot’s live and online digital asset auctions and comes with 9 years of domain registrar marketing experience having worked for Web.com and NameJet.

read more
 
Last edited:
5
•••
The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
2
•••
Thanks Robbie! Just credit to the original source/author :)
 
2
•••
.hiphop??!! What a ridiculous and embarrassing TLD!
 
4
•••
.hiphop??!! What a ridiculous and embarrassing TLD!
Would you say that if you owned it?

For the most part, I don't invest in anything other than .com but i would love to own my own extension and .hiphop is an extension can see rappers using, 1 thing with rappers (to be fair to them) is they embrace technology/web opportunities, hence many rappers involved in BAYC.

Best of luck to Monte and partners on this project.
 
Last edited:
3
•••
0
•••
.hiphop is an extension can see rappers using

How big is that market?

I worked with several new TLD applicants. I don't decide what other people do, but I did get to see some odd thinking at work.

A typical line of thinking went like... "The online auction business is worth $1.61 billion per year. Providing a .auction TLD will allow online auction companies to stake out that space and we can tap into that market."

The thing is, all you are doing is providing a narrower domain registration market. Regardless of how much revenue eBay has, they are a single domain registrant. A good deal of that $1.61 billion online auction market is accounted for by a handful of actual online auctioneers. Once they've registered a couple dozen domain names, your registry is done.

So the TLD game amounts to making faulty assumptions about how "market size" translates to "domain registration volume" in established industries, or making guesses about growth in new markets, such as .mobi.

Remember .mobi? Wow, hey, mobile devices were becoming a growth segment in digital access. Heck, right now, there is probably more user interaction with "the internet" generally through mobile devices than traditional computing platforms.

How did that work out for .mobi?

The other problem with descriptive TLDs, as opposed to TLDs that really don't mean anything, is that the registrant is accepting an artificial limitation, and boosting their own competition.

Artificial Limitation - Businesses and brands grow, evolve, and develop new markets. Take a brand like, say, Nike. They started making athletic shoes. So, let's say that .shoes was available way back when and they registered nike.shoes. The problem is reflected in my own experience with the brand. My last pair of Nike shoes gave out in the 1990's and I never bought another pair. However, I do own three or four Nike products - all workout clothes, no shoes. But it would be ridiculous for Nike to have to chase down Nike.shoes, Nike.shorts, Nike.pants, etc., to capture every product in their overall brand lineup. If they started with Nike.shoes and had stuck with Nike.shoes, then that also limits how customers perceive them.

Take .hiphop. What does the personality "Snoop Dogg" do, exactly? To be honest, I probably run across him in the media maybe seven or eight times a year. I don't think I've ever seen him perform anything remotely musical. He's either appearing in a movie cameo role, doing some promotion or appearance with Martha Stewart, or doing something else that has nothing remotely to do with "hip hop". So, sure, if someone wants to narrowcast themselves as a "hip hop artist" and not break into other media or media niches, then a .hiphop name makes all kinds of sense. If they have broader ambitions, or want to attract audiences outside of persons who consider themselves "hip hop" fans, then associating their personal brand with a narrow genre of media is a bone-dead stupid thing to do.

Promoting Competitors - So, consider my comments on auctions above. Ebay.auctions, although longer than Ebay.com, certainly does identify Ebay as an "auction provider" in a way that "Ebay.com" does not. And... that's precisely the problem here - descriptive TLDs flag your business as "one in a category" instead of a standout business. Since ".com" doesn't mean anything, it doesn't act as a pigeonhole in which your new, groundbreaking, revolutionary product or service announces itself to the world as "another auction provider".

Or, let's say that you have discovered the key to obtaining happiness, peace with the universe, emotional resilience, increased intelligence, and all around enlightenment. To promote your new insight, you go register yourname.yoga. Ah, okay, fine, got it. It's yoga, and you want to charge me $100 a session. I can get yoga for $10 a session from Swami Cheapass down the street. Next!

No matter how special your particular form of yoga and associated bell ringing, crystal gazing, chakra aligning powers might be, by identifying your thing as ".yoga", you bring to your brand everyone's pre-existing associations with that category of product or service, and have put up an obstacle in the way of making your brand impression before you even get a chance to explain what makes you special. Someone who paid Swami Cheapass $10 to have him stare at the crotch of their stretch pants for a half hour has made up their mind that they aren't paying some other creepy person $100 to do the same thing. By using ".yoga", you have not distinguished yourself. You have lumped yourself in with everyone else in the broader related market, no matter how "different" you are.

Now, please, I am not "pro new TLD" or "anti new TLD". I believe people should have the opportunity to succeed or fail at whatever lawful business they want to have a go at running, and I provide assistance within my specialty to the best of my ability to help people do whatever it is they want to do. If you want my professional opinion in the areas in which I am qualified, I gladly provide it. But having ridden on this carousel a couple of times now, it's not as if the scenery changes a lot each time it goes around.

I will say this though. If you have an interest in running a new TLD, you might want to seek out advice from someone whose principal interest is not in charging you money to help get you one.
 
Last edited:
17
•••
How big is that market?
You make sold points but I think hip-hop has become more popular than 90's rock. There are 10 of millions of enthusiast and artist all over the world.
 
1
•••
I guess it's better than .rapsheet...
 
2
•••
.hiphop will be the second most popular extension
.xyz will be the first
.com? what is .com?
 
0
•••
You make sold points but I think hip-hop has become more popular than 90's rock. There are 10 of millions of enthusiast and artist all over the world.

Those are true facts. Now, connect them with domain registration volume in some way.

Everyone on the planet has a mom. Billions of people love their mom. The .mom TLD has a TOTAL of 3,000 registrations.

Do people love hip-hop more than they love moms? Are there more hip-hop artists than moms?

Here's a better question, who buys more products and services in raw dollar volume? Moms or hip-hop fans?

Moms are a bigger market. The .hiphop extension is not new. Uniregistry was running it for years. It has 604 registrations in the zone - around 645 registrations total.

There are a ton of generic words you or anyone else could register, right now, in .hiphop, and beat whatever marketing the new owners plan to launch, if ICANN ever approves the transfer. Nobody has to agree with me about the commercial prospects of the TLD registry when they can make a killing on the coming rush of .hiphop names.

How about tattoos? Millions of people drop lots of money on them. 2300 registrations in tattoo.

Thats exactly what I'm talking about. Something can be hugely popular and represent an enormous market, but it doesn't translate to domain registrations in a corresponding TLD.
 
17
•••
Music is the greatest hobby in the world.

The price perception influences about 80% of registrants (SME).

Wear.hiphop
*Price $119.99
10 years *Renewal $1199.90
(* leading eventually to an increase, unpredictable)

WearHipHop.com
Price $3500 (acqusition, one time)
10 years *Renewal $97.90
(* leading eventually to an increase, predictable)

The remaining 20% contribution to registration lift comes from .extension penetration/impact (mainstream media's influence) and the third-party - streaming media providers (technology).

Regards
 
Last edited:
2
•••
John had some very good points and examples.

A two word extension in a limited niche. I am not really seeing much of a market.

I think this is likely the worst extension Frank Schilling applied for.

Brad
 
Last edited:
4
•••
What a terrible extension, .music will be a much better choice.
 
5
•••
I think this is likely the worst extension Frank Schilling applied for.

There's some fierce competition for that title.

.blackfriday and .christmas are close contenders.

The .blackfriday TLD is probably the best example of the type of thinking where "large economic activity" is believed to translate into "domain names". In reality to get to someone wanting to register a .blackfriday domain you first eliminate markets/countries/languages in which "Black Friday" is not even a thing. Then you narrow it down to the class of retailers in those markets who plan do to some sort of Black Friday promotion which is even worth spending developer resources on building a site that is going to be relevant for a couple of days out of the year (or simply forward to a specific address on their existing site). At best, you get a few major retailers who might register and use a domain name. The rest is just selling trademark protection (more on that below).

The story is similar for .christmas. Huge market volume, very little domain registration potential.

The auction winners *might* do better since no serious effort was ever made to market any of the Uniregistry TLDs. Either that or certain buyers have a business model that might work with low registration volume. In other words, they plan to develop a particular site or market a particular site concept to a targeted market, in which the domain name is not itself the primary driver of value.

Then, there is the reliable bottom of the bucket - trademark protection. There are entire TLDs and groups of TLDs for which trademark protection is the principal revenue driver. The best examples of that are the porn TLDs, .xxx, .adult and one or two others which are so memorable I don't recall them at the moment. There is more marketing effort, and more returned revenue on that effort, in using those TLDs as the classic protection racket. Yeah, sure, someone is going to register Chevrolet.xxx, put up some kind of porn, and consumers are going to believe it is associated with General Motors. Uh-huh, so some gullible nitwit at GM makes the risk-averse decision to spend a couple of thousand dollars to block it. Just imagine - having a product so bad that more people will pay you NOT to have it, than customers actually willing to pay you for it.

If you want to know what an actual expert thinks about .hiphop, one need go no further than Frank Schilling himself. At one point, he actually started and outfitted a recording studio, GoldFYR, which seems to have become inactive in favor of newer hobbies:


Now, mind you, this is the guy that OWNS .hiphop, and starts a hip-hop business. Did he register the .hiphop name for it? Nope. During the time that it had a website, it was solely located at .com.

What does that tell you?
 
4
•••
There's some fierce competition for that title.

.blackfriday and .christmas are close contenders.

The .blackfriday TLD is probably the best example of the type of thinking where "large economic activity" is believed to translate into "domain names". In reality to get to someone wanting to register a .blackfriday domain you first eliminate markets/countries/languages in which "Black Friday" is not even a thing. Then you narrow it down to the class of retailers in those markets who plan do to some sort of Black Friday promotion which is even worth spending developer resources on building a site that is going to be relevant for a couple of days out of the year (or simply forward to a specific address on their existing site). At best, you get a few major retailers who might register and use a domain name. The rest is just selling trademark protection (more on that below).

The story is similar for .christmas. Huge market volume, very little domain registration potential.

The auction winners *might* do better since no serious effort was ever made to market any of the Uniregistry TLDs. Either that or certain buyers have a business model that might work with low registration volume. In other words, they plan to develop a particular site or market a particular site concept to a targeted market, in which the domain name is not itself the primary driver of value.

Then, there is the reliable bottom of the bucket - trademark protection. There are entire TLDs and groups of TLDs for which trademark protection is the principal revenue driver. The best examples of that are the porn TLDs, .xxx, .adult and one or two others which are so memorable I don't recall them at the moment. There is more marketing effort, and more returned revenue on that effort, in using those TLDs as the classic protection racket. Yeah, sure, someone is going to register Chevrolet.xxx, put up some kind of porn, and consumers are going to believe it is associated with General Motors. Uh-huh, so some gullible nitwit at GM makes the risk-averse decision to spend a couple of thousand dollars to block it. Just imagine - having a product so bad that more people will pay you NOT to have it, than customers actually willing to pay you for it.

If you want to know what an actual expert thinks about .hiphop, one need go no further than Frank Schilling himself. At one point, he actually started and outfitted a recording studio, GoldFYR, which seems to have become inactive in favor of newer hobbies:


Now, mind you, this is the guy that OWNS .hiphop, and starts a hip-hop business. Did he register the .hiphop name for it? Nope. During the time that it had a website, it was solely located at .com.

What does that tell you?
Yeah, .blackfriday might be the winner. It's two words, it is time limited, and there is really no point for anyone to register it outside "brand protection".

I am not really a fan of extensions that mainly seem to exist to extract money from large TM holders like .sucks, .xxx, and others. It is just a sleazy business model when a large source of revenue is coming from protection from your product.

Brad
 
Last edited:
1
•••
look like xyz will have serious competition
 
0
•••
Thanks for sharing the news @Lox . The title is somewhat misleading, though. It is not that the group is creating .hiphop (it has been in general availability since Sept 3, 2014), but rather they are forming a management group for the TLD that they won in the UNR TLDs auction.

I tend to agree with view expressed by @jberryhill and others that it is really challenging to make the economics work for narrow application TLDs. Sure a few names will be valuable, but unless you can get a lot for those, or make it the in thing for every hip-hop artist to feel they need a .hiphop domain name, tough to see making money.

Bob

PS As someone new to the industry, I mainly knew Monte from the NamesCon auctions and did not realize how important his role has been in development of domain aftermarket.

"Monte pioneered the domain name aftermarket where domain names are traded, bought and sold, created the first domain live and online auction platform, developed whois privacy, and escrow/appraisal services."
 
Last edited:
3
•••
here are 10 of millions of enthusiast and artist all over the world.


Lil Wayne:

Screen Shot 2022-01-12 at 9.53.58 AM.png


Tupac:

Screen Shot 2022-01-12 at 9.54.12 AM.png


Nicki Minaj:

Screen Shot 2022-01-12 at 9.55.25 AM.png


Busta Rhymes:

Screen Shot 2022-01-12 at 9.58.04 AM.png


These artists and/or their rights holders, couldn't be bothered to spend a few dollars for a .com. The goodwill in those artist's names is worth stellar amounts. They don't make money running websites.

But someone is going to approach them with "Hey, I got some internet thing I want to sell you."

And, as pointed out above, it's not as if .hiphop is new. The TLD has been around for years, and has around 650 registrations in it.

Not even cybersquatters want it.

I certainly know why it sounds like a good idea. I was on the team that applied for and obtained the .hiphop TLD in the first place.

Again, maybe someone could blow some air into it with marketing, or bundled with some other package of "here's something we're going to see if they will spend money on" just like the long line of other people trying to sell them some shit every minute of every day of every week.

I wish them the best of luck, and maybe they'll get lucky or have a really fantastic marketing idea that nobody in any of the other gasping-for-air "great idea" TLDs has thought of.

But go tell someone who doesn't care about a ten dollar per year .com domain name why they should pay $XXX for a .hiphop one.


Screen Shot 2022-01-12 at 10.10.09 AM.png


What is a .hiphop domain name going to do for any of them?
 
5
•••
Lil Wayne:

Show attachment 207841

Tupac:

Show attachment 207842

Nicki Minaj:

Show attachment 207843

Busta Rhymes:

Show attachment 207844

These artists and/or their rights holders, couldn't be bothered to spend a few dollars for a .com. The goodwill in those artist's names is worth stellar amounts. They don't make money running websites.

But someone is going to approach them with "Hey, I got some internet thing I want to sell you."

And, as pointed out above, it's not as if .hiphop is new. The TLD has been around for years, and has around 650 registrations in it.

Not even cybersquatters want it.

I certainly know why it sounds like a good idea. I was on the team that applied for and obtained the .hiphop TLD in the first place.

Again, maybe someone could blow some air into it with marketing, or bundled with some other package of "here's something we're going to see if they will spend money on" just like the long line of other people trying to sell them some shit every minute of every day of every week.

I wish them the best of luck, and maybe they'll get lucky or have a really fantastic marketing idea that nobody in any of the other gasping-for-air "great idea" TLDs has thought of.

But go tell someone who doesn't care about a ten dollar per year .com domain name why they should pay $XXX for a .hiphop one.


Show attachment 207845

What is a .hiphop domain name going to do for any of them?
They don't own the .COM but they are going to want the .hiphop... :xf.laugh:

Plus you could make a more compelling case for an extension like .music, than one that is so limiting and awkward.

They need to take this extension out behind the shed and shoot it. :ROFL:

Brad
 
0
•••
This reminds me of this -

https://www.thedomains.com/2012/06/07/physio-new-gtld-applicant-revealed/

Incredibility limited market, with lofty predictions.

“I was reading the newspaper one morning when I heard about the ICANN initiative and I thought, ‘That’s fantastic’, I want one of those for my practice website. I thought no one would do it in our profession and I thought if they wouldn’t I would.”

“As I read the newspaper article I was thinking what is the next business move for me, with $185,000 I could buy a house and have one tenant, which makes me $20,000 a year or I could have 20,000 tenants paying $100 – so it is a much better business model,” he says.

“The potential is there, as my research shows there are 700,000 physios in the world, so 20,000 is in the realms of 2% or 3% of this.”



That is just not how things work. The extension (.physio) currently has 1K regs, and many of those are likely registry reserved.

You see similar logic on shows like Shark Tank.
The fitness market is worth $75B a year. If we can only capture 1% of that market!!!

Brad
 
Last edited:
2
•••
Lil Wayne:

Show attachment 207841

Tupac:

Show attachment 207842

Nicki Minaj:

Show attachment 207843

Busta Rhymes:

Show attachment 207844

These artists and/or their rights holders, couldn't be bothered to spend a few dollars for a .com. The goodwill in those artist's names is worth stellar amounts. They don't make money running websites.

But someone is going to approach them with "Hey, I got some internet thing I want to sell you."

And, as pointed out above, it's not as if .hiphop is new. The TLD has been around for years, and has around 650 registrations in it.

Not even cybersquatters want it.

I certainly know why it sounds like a good idea. I was on the team that applied for and obtained the .hiphop TLD in the first place.

Again, maybe someone could blow some air into it with marketing, or bundled with some other package of "here's something we're going to see if they will spend money on" just like the long line of other people trying to sell them some shit every minute of every day of every week.

I wish them the best of luck, and maybe they'll get lucky or have a really fantastic marketing idea that nobody in any of the other gasping-for-air "great idea" TLDs has thought of.

But go tell someone who doesn't care about a ten dollar per year .com domain name why they should pay $XXX for a .hiphop one.


Show attachment 207845

What is a .hiphop domain name going to do for any of them?


A quick search shows most are using instagram to promote themselves.
 
1
•••
This reminds me of this -

https://www.thedomains.com/2012/06/07/physio-new-gtld-applicant-revealed/

Incredibility limited market, with lofty predictions.

“I was reading the newspaper one morning when I heard about the ICANN initiative and I thought, ‘That’s fantastic’, I want one of those for my practice website. I thought no one would do it in our profession and I thought if they wouldn’t I would.”

“As I read the newspaper article I was thinking what is the next business move for me, with $185,000 I could buy a house and have one tenant, which makes me $20,000 a year or I could have 20,000 tenants paying $100 – so it is a much better business model,” he says.

“The potential is there, as my research shows there are 700,000 physios in the world, so 20,000 is in the realms of 2% or 3% of this.”



That is just not how things work. The extension (.physio) currently has 1K regs, and many of those are likely registry reserved.

You see similar logic on shows like Shark Tank.
The fitness market is worth $75B a year. If we can only capture 1% of that market!!!

Brad

Might make a good episode on Shark Tank.
 
1
•••
1
•••
A quick search shows most are using instagram to promote themselves.

Which might pull in a whole lot of Instagram users, for a free service, but isn't going to sell a .hiphop domain.

Did you know that Justin Bieber promoted .tattoo?

http://domainincite.com/16999-bieber-plug-has-no-impact-on-tattoo-sales

A Facebook update reading simply “My Tumblr is http://joker.tattoo” has been “liked” over 230,000 times and shared almost 2,500 times by the over 70 million people following him on the platform.

Justin Bieber



On Twitter, where Bieber has 52.6 million followers, his identical tweet was retweeted over 50,000 times and favorited close to 60,000 times.

The “news” was even picked up by MTV, which gently ribbed the musician for apparently (don’t ask me, I’m 37) not understanding that Tumblr isn’t just for “selfies”.

But the widespread publicity for a .tattoo name had no impact whatsoever on .tattoo sales, judging by zone files.
The Uniregistry TLD hasn’t grown by more than one name per day since Bieber’s tweet.

One June 27 the .tattoo zone file had 6,312 names in it, today it has 6,316.


----------------

Hey, if you want Justin Bieber's used .tattoo domain name, have at it. It was never renewed after being used for a one-off promotion that didn't result in jack squat. There are now only 2300 .tattoo domain names.
 
2
•••
Back