.Sucks has now passed 6,000 registered domain names.
According to ntldstats.com .Sucks has 6,153 domain name registered.
We know that around 3,400 domain names were registered in Sunrise for up to $2,000 wholesale.
That is almost $7 Million dollars if they were all at $2K, which they should be since the Sunrise period was only opened to those in the Trademark Clearinghouse (THCH) and all those in the TMCH had their domains priced at the premium $2K figure (wholesale).
Since Sunrise closed, there are another 3,700 domain names registered for at least $200 per year (Wholesale) or another $750,000 a year.
That is $7.5 Million a year in revenue and there is a half a year to go.
ICANN reportedly received $100,000 from the registry and placed an extra tax on .sucks of $1 a domain for up to its first 900,000 transactions (registrations/renewals).
Disregarding the one time payment to ICANN of $100K, ICANN has only made $6,100 so far off of registration fees from its $1 Tax.
Another major cost for any new gTLD string is the backend cost for making the registry work, but most of those costs are paid on a per domain fee.
So the back-end fee, while it may have some minimum guarantees, is only covering 6,100 domain names at this point.
.Sucks is probably one of the better known new gTLD’s since it got a ton of free publicity in hundreds of articles written about it in mainstream publications. While most articles were critical of .Sucks pricing, as we sit today that falls into “there is no bad publicity” column.
Last week .Sucks rolled out a few strategically placed billboards and got more press on it.
Based on the fact that almost all .Sucks domain names are registered by the trademark holder and defensive by nature, .sucks in my opinion, can expect to have one of highest renewal rates of any new gTLD (and maybe the highest).
.Sucks therefore could be generating some $10M by the end of 2015 and could pull in $100M or more over its 10 year contract with ICANN. (All new gTLD’s have a 10 year contract with ICANN). (Consider we are still months away from the discounted .sucks registration program and .Sucks added some 200 registrations in July already and there are premium priced domain names which may have already been registered or will be in the future.)
.Sucks was reportedly won in a private auction for over $3 Million (plus the $185K application cost), although I have heard some whisper numbers that would put the amount paid in the private auction more than double the reported number.
There is no doubt that the registry must have spent $1M or more on legal fees wouldn’t be surprised if the number was over $2Million in legal fees. Moreover and like any other registry they had startup costs, marketing, staff and years of chasing the domain, but many of those are one time costs.
Looking back at it 5 or 10 years from now .sucks might be one of the biggest money makers of the whole new gTLD program.
Maybe the biggest money maker of any one new gTLD string.
For those that are interested here are all the .Sucks domain registrations as of today.
Keep in mind there maybe a lots more registered domain names, without name servers as domain names that don’t have name servers do not show up in the zone file as well as paid blocked domains as well.
