We noted last week that North Sound Names a company owned and/or controlled by Frank Schilling, registered some 31,000 domain names in new gTLD’s extensions owned by another Frank Schilling Company, Uniregistry.
About 10,000 domain names were registered by North Sound Domains in .blackfriday; another 5,000 domain names under the new gTLD .Hiphop; and 16,000 domain names were registered by North Sound Names under .Audio.
At the time we noted that North Sound Names with those registrations had almost 75,000 domain names in new gTLD’s of Uniregistry.
Today it appears over 12,000 more domain names in another Uniregistry new gTLD extensions were registered by Frank Individually, this time mostly in .Christmas
According to nTLDstats.com the largest registrant of new gTLD domain names is North Sound Names with 74,479 domain registrations and the 5th largest registrant is now, Frank T. Schilling with 12,216 domain names.
I’m not sure why Frank registered this domains personally but between himself and North Sound Names there are over 86K domain names registered in Uniregistry new gTLD’s.
According to nTLDstats.com, .Christmas is now the 36th most registered new gTLD with 13,089 domains..
Again according to nTLDstats.com, Uniregistry has a total of 133,776 new gTLD domain names registered.
North Sound Names and Frank own about 65% of all Uniregistry new gTLD domain names.
I’ve been wondering.. When he “registers” these is he “reserving” them? How does this work? Does he have to pay the ICANN per-domain fee? I guess he could just register all domains and as one of his companies is paying the other, and because of his unique tax status – he does not net gain/lose any money? I guess the question… Are domains like these essentially “free” for registries to register? Or is there actual costs for them in doing this? Sorry for a lot of questions, since last week’s post I was thinking about a lot of this but don’t know enough to speculate how it really works.
Kd
A registry can reserve all the domains they want but they will not resolve or be active unless they are registered.
Once a domain is registered a registry does have to pay ICANN per domain but they have a $25K minimum payment anyway which pays for a lot of domains.
Most registries have a backend provider that they have to pay a per domain fee to everytime one is registered which is the expensive part as some registries I have heard are paying as much as $5 a domain to their back end provider.
I believe Frank owns his own backend provider so he may not have that kind of cost.
So I don’t think its a bad idea for him to register domains, it actually maybe a smart idea but when you look at the numbers of new gTLD registered and Uniregistry in particular it would make the extensions look a lot more popular than they are to the casual observer
you have got to be kidding me… where’s the value in .christmas what junk.. I thought Frank was my anti nGTLD saviour..
Frank owns .Christmas the registry as well not just these domain names.
Not sure how is can be your anti-new gTLD Hero when he applied for 54 of them