The ICANN official website has updated information on the new .FANS gTLD. The registry agreement was assigned to a company called ZDNS International; originally it was delegated to Asiamix Digital, which clearly failed to launch it and last August sold the management rights to Fans TLD, a CentralNic subsidiary, with the domain having about 1,700 names at the time.
However, even a large player like CentralNic failed to change the situation. The company didn’t make any effort to promote the domain, so it remained flat, and the company decided to sell it. At the same time, its competitor .FAN, managed by Donuts (also acquired from Asiamix Digital), has gone from 0 to almost 3,000 registrations.
Of course it is difficult to say how the second sale will change the future of the domain. Domain Incite notes that its new registry, ZDNS International, is a large Hong Kong subsidiary of major China-based provider ZDNS. It provides DNS services for more than 20 gTLDs, mostly Chinese-language, but has never served as registry before.
