MIAMI — ICM Registry today said that its .porn and .adult domain extensions each received about 4,000 registrations during the sunrise trademark period.
Those numbers are more than any other new generic top-level domain extensions to date, ICM Registry said, noting that the best previous gTLD launches only amounted to about 750 sunrise registrations, “with the average being no more than a few hundred.”
TheDomains.com reported today that the number of registrations for the two gTLDs already represent a windfall for ICM Registry, which paid $185,000 for each extension.
Stuart Lawley, ICM Registry’s CEO, told Michael Berkens, the publisher of TheDomains.com, that the average sunrise registration was for 2.5 years, “meaning that those 8,000 registrations turned into 20,000 registrations in domain years.”
As a result, “ICM spent $370,000 for the two applications and has already banked over $1.2 million in just sunrise,” Berkens said.
“No other company applied for .porn or for .adult so ICM got each extension for the application fee of $185,000 each.”
In related news, ICM Registry has expanded eligibility for its Domain Matching Program and will now allow .xxx sunrise holders to participate in the .porn and .adult Domain Matching Program.
Launching May 6 and ending May 31, the Domain Matching Program now allows both .xxx sunrise reservants and .xxx domain holders a priority opportunity to acquire directly matching names before those names become available to the general public.
Names not registered during the Domain Matching Program become available on June 4.
Visit ICM Registry’s Domain Check Tool to learn the status of domain names across ICANN’s gTLD Program.