discuss The .icu showcase

[Bob Hawkes]

I hope I am not duplicating a thread, but could not find a showcase for the newly in general availability .icu extension. I admit, in general I am not a fan of the extension, and it will be interesting to see how successful it is. Konstantinos Zournas commented on Twitter overnight that .icu had learned nothing from last 4 years of ngTLDs and I think there is a lot of validity to that. He did not outline what his tweet meant, but I presume referencing lack promotion, lack getting end users on board first, bargain initial pricing, holding premium domains at registry.

I believe in general the extension is intended to mean "I see you" but somehow the extension rubs me the wrong way (biz does also, along with many other extensions).

I have never seen this elsewhere, but another possible use for .icu would be as in intensive care unit, since it is a common abbreviation for that. Will be interesting to see if it gets any use with that meaning.

It is encouraging that it seems (at least from what Namecheap are listing as regular price) that the renewal rate is less than $8. A lot of good names seem to be reserved as premium by registry, although with variable prices some of which are only a bit above normal.

Do you plan to register any .icu?

If you have, registered some, share them with us!

 

[Bob Hawkes]

I have sold one of my .icu domain names (e-/s/p/o/r/t/s) via inbound after promotion from my website and blog. I give the complete details including price, acquisition and process at this NPs link.

 

[Bob Hawkes]

I updated my ICU review to reflect the most current stats. The extension is now up to 75,000 registrations. More impressively, it now has one Alexa 1M website for each 300 registrations (259 sites: data at https://namestat.org/icu), an amazingly high number for a new extension. I know there are issues and ways to distort Alexa, still strong for a ngTLD. Here is link to my updated review. Three aftermarket sales of .icu on NameBio ($128 to $190 range).

 

[Bernard Wright]

They were so cheap, I speculated on quite a few.

321 (.) icu
did (.) icu
ido (.) icu
fam (.) icu
mag (.) icu
dude (.) icu
haha (.) icu
hehe (.) icu
whoa (.) icu
lmao (.) icu
will (.) icu
hope (.) icu
slim (.) icu
arvr (.) icu
bugs (.) icu
maga (.) icu
birds (.) icu
playa (.) icu
eyewear (.) icu

Plus some medical-related domains that are relevant to keyword searches:

delerium (.) icu ("ICU Delerium" keyword)
rnsalary (.) icu ("ICU RN Salary")
rn-salary (.) icu
nursesalary (.) icu
nurse-salary (.) icu

...and a few more, but I'll leave it at that for now.

 

[Bob Hawkes]

ICU got some nice names @Bernard Wright ! I particularly like hope, birds, did, bugs and will! Good luck with them!

 

[Bernard Wright]

Thank you, Bob! I don't know much about SEO, but I presume the keyword-related words might hold unique value for some. If you google "ICU[space]" the suggested autocompletes include a few in my list. I quite like eyewear domain. I played around with it a little. The site is live but I'm too green to know how to develop it further.

I understand peoples' apprehension regarding the ICU gTLD, but I do think there are some unique opportunities to be explored. It's nice to know you share my sentiments. Thanks again.

 

[Bob Hawkes]

I understand peoples' apprehension regarding the ICU gTLD, but I do think there are some unique opportunities to be explored. It's nice to know you share my sentiments.

Yes, even though any new venture has some risks, I am positive about .icu. I think their 4 tier premium level but with a guarantee that all renewals are at standard prices, is what is best for the industry.

I have a number of .icu, and continue to look for options available at either reg fee or the lowest premium level.

At first I kind of hated it - it sounded gimmicky like the biz has never resonated well with me. But I have grown to like it. I think we will see mainly use in video related applications and for visual product catalogs, but I think other possibilities exist as well.

Even though 350,000 registered (it has just passed app and is in 12th place overall among the ngTLDs) , still some good words can be found.

I agree that there is not a lot of respect for it among many domain investors, mainly related to the deep discounting and so far limited prices for the handful of aftermarket sales. Abuse is not horrendous, but has crept up with discounting and volume sales. I hope that will not get higher. Some of the critics I found have not really looked into the extension and are unaware that all renewals are at standard rates, even for the premium names. Or they simply are critics of any new extension!

Estibot tends to be unkind to it because it treats it in search as a two word across the dot. They do this for example with science and space and there it makes sense - i.e. if I have frog.science it makes sense how searched 'frog science' is. But here it does not make sense - e.g. if I have cats.icu really search should not be based on 'cats icu'. For many new extensions, like .top, .site and .zyz they don't combine across the dot. I agree it is complex to figure out the right approach for the 700 ngTLDs.

Bob

 

[Bernard Wright]

Thank you for the thorough info. I browsed your NamesThat.win site and you do have quite a variety of domains, and clearly a comprehensive understanding of the industry. Some very informative blog articles on there as well. Very impressive.

 

[Rob Monster]

Epik is an accredited registrar for .ICU.

We will shortly release a web app that will bundle .ICU domains with personal video conferencing as an integrated feature. We'll be meeting with the .ICU team at ICANN in Kobe this weekend.

I see good potential for .ICU around this idea -- much earlier to remember handpicked.icu than zoom.com/random-guid, for example.

 

[barman]

imo this is one of the worst extensions out of the new tlds. All i see with icu is "intensive care unit" It will never, ever take off as "i see you" I will pay you to not register .icu domains.

 

[hawkeye]

I wonder if anyone registered ICU names.

Hell yeah! Every fricking email spamming scumbag organization got a boat load of them! I swear I must get 5-10 junk spams a day with this useless stupid extension! That’s probably how they were able to afford a booth at NamesCon and then brag about their regged numbers, because there is absolutely no reason to invest in, or a use for, this stupid gtld!!

 

[Bob Hawkes]

While my first reaction was to hate .icu as being way too 'cute' it has grown on me. As with any extension you can interpret the extension as you wish, really, and I know some have registered health words treating it like Intensive Care Unit as first came to you @barman.

Interpreted as "I See You" it is a natural for video conferencing and it is really interesting to know of that forthcoming development @Rob Monster. Best wishes for it! Interpreted as seeing over video I see potential of the extension for sports, television, media, tourism, etc. There is also some real time use of it as a catalog type meaning.

I am surprised you get so much spam from it, @hawkeye, and hope it goes away. As with any deeply discounted TLD abuse does go up as price goes down. As of today Spamhaus, who manage abuse at many billions of email accounts so know the market pretty well and have been analyzing abuse for more than 15 years, give it an abuse score of 2.93, about equal to .info, much better than .biz, a bit worse than .us, and about 3 to 4 times worse than .com and .net. As such it is certainly not great but nor is it anywhere near the worst 10 or 20. Note that these numbers vary somewhat day by day.

It is still early days, but not much resale market yet, only 3 (at least >$100) sales on NameBio. I like to view it as I have 33% of the domain aftermarket sales in the extension .

One thing I most like is that renewals are all at standard rates, so even if you buy a premium at $16 or $78 or $780 or $7800 (they have only 4 tiers, many less than .dev for example) all renewals are at standard prices, just about $6 to $9 most places. Some really fine names are still available at the lowest premium level, and at these renewal costs, it is not much investment to hold for a few years.

By the way, in case people did not notice, .icu is now in top 10 registration wise among ngTLDs.

I think they have done too much deep discounting and wish they had got more significant major player use at launch, but overall I think the extension has done a better job than many with their launch. They have about 420 sites in Alexa 1M, about 1 per 1000 registrations, not bad for an extension in first year, although the ratio has gone down as the months go by and deep discounting applied. I wish more of the sites with traffic were also sites with significant domain authority.

Not trying to push the argument either way, and totally accept the sceptics on the TLD. As always just trying to balance views with what the evidence suggests. JMHO

Bob

Disclosure: I do have about a dozen .ICU in my personal portfolio of about 280 domains. Obviously I have no association with the TLD beyond that.

 

[TestCase]

Hell yeah! Every fricking email spamming scumbag organization got a boat load of them! I swear I must get 5-10 junk spams a day with this useless stupid extension! That’s probably how they were able to afford a booth at NamesCon and then brag about their regged numbers, because there is absolutely no reason to invest in, or a use for, this stupid gtld!!

I concur!
https://www.namepros.com/posts/7070475/

Just a sampling of what we receive(d) at my day job - though I haven't checked it lately...
https://www.namepros.com/posts/7074514/

 

[Bob Hawkes]

Thanks for providing the anecdotal evidence of spam @TestCase. While that has not been my experience over the 9 mail accounts I use for one thing or another I can actually only recall one case of .icu spam received but I daily get many from .com and .biz in particular, and some from .ru in spurts. Anyway my experience is just anecdotal (as is that of your company I would suggest).

I think the best thing is usually to go to a large statistical sample. For those unfamiliar with Spamhaus this is from their own site.

"The Spamhaus Project is an international nonprofit organization that tracks spam and related cyber threats such as phishing, malware and botnets, provides realtime actionable and highly accurate threat intelligence to the Internet's major networks, corporations and security vendors, and works with law enforcement agencies to identify and pursue spam and malware sources worldwide.

Founded in 1998, Spamhaus is based in Geneva, Switzerland and London, UK and is run by a dedicated staff of 38 investigators, forensics specialists and network engineers located in 10 nations.

Spamhaus realtime threat and reputation blocklists currently protect over 3 Billion user mailboxes* and are responsible for blocking the vast majority of spam and malware sent out on the Internet. Spamhaus data is today used by the majority of the Internet's ISPs, email service providers, corporations, universities, governments and military networks."​

In Spamhaus data as I pointed out ICU is indeed currently worse than com and net (about 4x), but is only slightly different from info, a bit worse than .us, and substantially better than .biz. There is no doubt that it was better in the early months after release, then went up, and has now very slightly edged down but is pretty constant around the 3 abuse score level. I monitor it every week or two.

While anecdotal information is of interest, and in some situations highly relevant, I would argue most of the time it is better to use evidence from an independent organization that monitors and protects about 3 billion email accounts and has been doing this for about 20 years and have 38 professionals on staff.

For those unfamiliar with their site you can, on the same page that lists the 10 worst, in the little box to left select any extension and get a score. Lower is better.

Bob

 

[Joakim]

The only businesses that would be willing to spend money for keywords in this extension imo, would be intensive care units. Obviously.

I don't like it, but I registered Hotline and Helpline. Both classified as premiums by registry. Only $8 renewals (approx) though.

 

[Mister Funsky]

wonder if anyone registered ICU names

No...i did not.

 

[wizard]

I wouldn't bother complete waste of time worst TLD just another one to fail...

 

[TestCase]

....In Spamhaus data as I pointed out ICU is indeed currently worse than com and net (about 4x), but is only slightly different from info, a bit worse than .us, and substantially better than .biz. There is no doubt that it was better in the early months after release, then went up, and has now very slightly edged down but is pretty constant around the 3 abuse score level. I monitor it every week or two...

I've been keeping an eye on Spamhaus for a decade plus. At least one (server side) if not two (client side) of our spam filters at my day job currently use them for filtering emails.

In the last several years the frequency (commonality ???) of the extensions on the spam we receive has diverged significantly from the results I've seen on Spamhaus. I have no idea why that is, but we have used literally hundreds (thousands ??) of different email addresses in our ads and postings throughout the US over the years so we have plenty of exposure to harvesters.

Of SHs Top 10 TLD's, the only ones I have seen with anything nearing the frequency of icu in our filters are .gdn, .world, .tw and occasionally bid. We only receive a smattering of the other Top 10 extensions - though I don't ever remember seeing a .work.

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

I registered a few short domains in 2018 just to burn my remaining deposit at registrar...
Were no inquiries, traffic is also ~0.

 

[Bob Hawkes]

I have registered I think about 12 in total, a few in early days and the last one about a month ago. I have so far sold one. All the ones I registered were non-premium (still considering one at the lowest premium level). Most of them are in either sports niches or therapy/counselling related. The one I sold paid many times over for my total investment so far.

Bob

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

The one of those I have in .icu I sold for $999 in .me