It looks like someone is by now typosquatting on recently delegated top level domain names
Just a few dozen second level domain names for fresh TLDs have been registered so far. Yet it looks like people are by now typosquatting on them.
The prior week .Club Domains LLC, the firm that’s launching the .club top level domain name, bought nicclub.com for $3,500 on Sedo.
Anyone who has been following fresh top level domain name delegations will immediately recognize this as a defensive move for what will become a typo of .Club’s first second level domain name, nic.club.
When a fresh top level domain name is delegated, the registries are using nic.TLD as their first website. For example, Frank Schilling’s Uniregistry by now has sites up at nic.tattoo and nic.sexy. When I went to NicClub.com yesterday, it had what I imagine is the firm’s soon-to-be website for nic.club.
Some people unfamiliar with fresh TLDs will end up typing in nicclub.com or nictattoo.com instead of the correct domain name.
Nicclub.com was originally registered in 2001 and then more recently in 2011, so I doubt the seller had the .club domain in mind when it registered the domains.
But it got me curious, so I looked up how many “nicTLD.com” domains have been registered for the 30 Latin-script top level domain names that have by now been delegated.
The answer: 16 have been registered, and 9 of them were registered just this year.
One Ontario man registered six domain names this month, counting nicsexy.com, nictattoo.com, nicgraphics.com, nicphotography.com, and nicguru.com. All of these correspond to recently delegated top level domain names. I can’t be sure what his goal is. I left him a message and will update this story if I hear back.
The group behind .Uno smartly registered nicuno.com this month.
Looking down the list of recently signed fresh TLD contracts (for domains that haven’t been delegated), many other nicTLD.com domain names have been registered this year. This isn’t a coincidence.
In the long run, I doubt many fresh TLD operators will use nic.tld as a primary marketing site. Still, it’s interesting to see that people are by now snapping up what could be considered typos of second level domains under fresh TLDs.
