WordPress to run .blog
The .blog TLD had been requested by 9 registries, amongst them big names like Google, Donuts, Minds and Machines and Afilias. To determine who would be allowed to actually run this TLD, an auction was held last February. The company with the winning bid was “Primer Nival S.A.” from Panama. A company nobody had heard of before. They paid “about $19 million” for the right to run .blog.
It has now been revealed that this Panamese company actually was a cloak for the company behind the famous blogging software WordPress. They used an unknown company in the bidding, hoping this would somewhat temper the pricing. It however seems this wasn’t too big a success, as with a $19 million price tag, .blog most probably is the most expensive new gTLD. Other TLD’s of which the bidding price had leaked only reached figures around $7 million (.tech) or between $5 million and $6 million (for .salon and .realty).
ICANN has determined that domain names under generic words (like .blog) should be available for everyone. So WordPress won’t be allowed to exclusively sell .blog domain names only to people having a WordPress operated website. You should be able to buy .blog domain names in the future with any registrar offering new gTLD’s.
The back-end will be operated by Nominet. This is also the registry for the .uk country code. As one of the registry back-end operators in the new gTLD field, Nominet hadn’t been able to get lots of traction to their gTLD registry service until recently. They only operated a local geoTLD’s. But earlier this year Minds and Machines announced that they would switch their TLD’s to Nominet’s back-end and now .blog will also use it.
Now the news is out, the .blog TLD has officially changed hands from the Panamese cloaking company, to a new sister company of WordPress. The name of the official registry for .blog is the no less than hilarious pun “Knock Knock WHOIS there”.
Timing for the launch of .blog isn’t known yet, but Knock Knock WHOIS there states that they hope to still launch in 2016.