ICANN has updated data on domain zone registries on its official website. It follows from the update that two new gTLDs - .REALTY and .LOCKER - have changed their owners at once. The .REALTY aroused great interest in its time. Fegistry won the rights to manage it, paying $5,588,888 at the auction, outperforming other bidders, including the Donuts registry.
Focusing on the specifics of the potential audience, the company set the cost of an annual domain name registration at $300. For several years, the number of registrations in the domain fluctuated around the figure of 2,000. But in September 2020, a more than generous promotion followed: Epik reduced the registration price to $0.99. The number of registrations soared to almost 18,000, but - as is usually the case in such cases - most of them were not renewed after a year. Today, according to the Domain Name Wire, there are about 1,500 registrations in the domain zone.
Interestingly, the Donuts registry still received the rights to manage the .REALTY by acquiring them from Fegistry at the end of the same 2020. But the purchase, apparently, did not live up to expectations: now Identity Digital (as you know, this is the new name of Donuts) has sold the domain to the Internet Naming Company.
As for the .LOCKER, it was delegated as a brand name to Dish DBS, a major American satellite broadcaster. The word locker has many meanings, but in its most general sense it means any box or container that is locked. How the broadcaster intended to use it remained a mystery: in the more than 15 years that have passed since the delegation, only one domain name has been registered in the domain - the mandatory nic.locker. The new domain zone registrant is Orange Domains LLC, which was registered only last year and, apparently, specifically for this deal.
