Thousands of reserved domains per TLD — Uniregistry activates
Firm held back thousands of domains and has now activated and parked them.
If you take a look at Uniregistry’s zone files for its TLD launches so far, you might think yesterday was a huge day.
Following all, its previously launched .sexy domain jumped from 6,849 to 12,318 registrations. That’s an 80% increase.
.Tattoo jumped from just 1,432 to 5,932, a jump of over 300%.
And .link, which launched yesterday, now has a staggering 20,000+ domains in the zone.
It’s all a mirage.
Yesterday Uniregistry activated its reserved domain names in top level domains that have launched so far, massively increasing the size of its zones. It accounts for basically all of the growth in .sexy and .tatto.
Judging by some quick checks, it appears that the majority of domains in .link, which just launched with 20,000+ domains in the zone file, are actually domains reserved by the registry.
That includes almost all three digit domains that correspond to area codes. I ran whois checks on 434 names in .link starting with aac.link and only 10 (yes, 10) of them were registered by someone other than North Sound Names. Two of those were by a DomainNameSales employee! This explains why I had so much trouble finding worthwhile domains to register yesterday.
North Sound Names, a Grand Cayman firm, is running premium sales for Uniregistry.
All of the domains are parked on Frank Schilling’s DomainNameSales.com with for sale links. They’re also all registered at the firm’s Uniregistry registrar, meaning the registrar is technically growing like a weed.
To be fair, Uniregistry hasn’t asked anyone to judge the size of its domain base based on the zone.
Uniregistry founder Frank Schilling told The Domains that .Link, .Pics, and .Photo had all surpassed 10,000 “arms length registrations” yesterday. I guess that’s the total non-North Sound domains across all three domains.
I’ll be curious for the reaction to the level of reserved domains. Schilling has stated the firm was only holding back a modest number of domains per TLD. I suspect his definition of modest will be different than that of many domain investors.
