After raising $100 million last year, top-level domain registration startup Donuts has secured a second round of funding, the company announced today.

Donuts is focused on becoming a new registry for generic top-level domains (gTLDs), or the domain extensions that will go beyond simply .com, .net, .org, and others. Regulators have previously capped the total number of gTLDs at 22 total extensions, but that is about to change thanks to a decision by ICANN last year. Donuts, however, won’t be the place consumers go to buy their domains, rather it’s the place that wishes to sell domains under a particular extension, like .bearclaw, .name, .bbq, etc.

The startup did not disclose the amount raised in its second round, but it did say the equity investment is twice the valuation of the initial $100 million round and doubled the company’s available capital. Donuts CEO Paul Stahura also confirmed that the company has access to additional capital should the need arise. The series B round itself was led by Generation Partners, with participation from previous investors.

Donuts, which has already applied for 307 new gTLDs, plans to use the additional money from the new round to secure even more domain extensions.

Demand Media bought Name.com today, pulling the company’s nearly 1.5 million domain names into its own registrar, eNom.

The companies did not reveal the terms of the acquisition, though it did state that with Name.com on board, Demand Media will now have 15 million registered domain names. Specifically, Demand Media was interested in the retail clientele Name.com built up. It hasn’t been able to reach retail customers through its domain registrar. This is a much simpler way of acquiring, so to speak, the customers it wants.

“The domain name industry is entering its greatest period of change and opportunity as it prepares for the launch of more than one thousand new top level domains (TLDs),” said Taryn Naidu, Demand Media’s executive vice president of registrar services, in a blog post, “With that change, we recognized the opportunity to expand our ability to educate, satisfy and service a greatly expanded and global audience.”

Naidu is referencing the decision by ICANN, the nonprofit organization that regulates and manages domains, to expand the available “domain extensions,” such as .com and .edu. People may soon be able to register domains such as .doctor or .media.

Demand Media is an Internet “content” company, which helps its clients put articles and videos on its social networks, websites, and it finds people to write original content for clients. It also has advertising products and its domain name arm. The company runs a number of websites of its own, such as eHow and Cracked, which many consider as content farms. The company has raised a sizable amount of funding — $375 million — since 2007.

Name card image via Shutterstock

These companies, and plenty more, are asking ICANN, the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, for no less than 1934 different top level domains …  a huge expansion of the 280 currently in use, which mainly consist of the familiar .com, .net, .org, and the various country domains.

This past week ICANN met in Toronto to discuss new top-level domains. Hundreds of companies want to own new top-level domains, and some want to own almost hundreds of. Amazon, for instance, has applied for 77 top-level domains — app, of course, but also .kindle, .movie, .music, .author, and .buy.

What is a company or brand to do in this massive, potentially confusing new world which promised to give us more than 2000 top level domains? VentureBeat talked to Liesbeth Mack-de Boer about what’s coming up, what’s hot, and what are some the pitfalls.

Source: Webfest.me

Liesbeth Mack-de Boer

She’s the chief sales officer for Sedo, the worlds largest domain marketplace. You may have heard of Sedo when the company processed the sale of Sex.com for $13 million two years ago. The company currently has 16 million domain names in its database for sale.

VentureBeat: Which of the new domains are you excited about?

Mack-de Boer: We really like some of the geos like .NYC. There are also a lot of generics, such as .app. Others that will do very well include .green and .eco, and even non-commercial ones like .hiv — we were really skeptical about them at first — have developed a really nice community spirit around them.

We’re also really excited about .pizza.

VentureBeat: Do we really need new domain names? Will companies buy them?

Mack-de Boer: I absolutely think that they will buy them. For instance, to promote their green presence, companies can buy their brand.green. We already have companies trying to do that.

There’s great added value in a lot of the new names. There are other ones that we don’t know how they will end up … we’re not enthusiastic about all of them.

VentureBeat: It kind of seems like a money grab, forcing companies to buy more domain names.

Mack-de Boer: Well, it’s all about marketing. Companies don’t need to buy every extension for every product … most companies already prioritize what they buy.

VentureBeat: If you don’t buy your brand.whatever, will your brand still be protected?

Mack-de Boer: Yes. Deloitte is building a trademark clearing house so brands can register and if someone tried to register a domain name that conflicts with their brands, they will be notified.

VentureBeat: What happens to .com in this new reality?

Mack-de Boer: .com is still the strongest domain by far, and we expect that it will stay king. But it remains to be seen what people will go to …

VentureBeat: Do you expect any consumer confusion when the new domains come in?

Mack-de Boer: Yes. There will be consumer confusion for sure. In fact, we’ve been discussing how to work around it. For example … how do you put it on a billboard?

If you use newyork.pizza, what does that mean to people? Some are going to have to bring back the www. in front to ensure that their new address is understood.

After meeting, it appears that no decisions on top-level domains will be made until an April 2013 meeting in Beijing. However, according to SEDO, most if not all of the domains will be making it through.

photo credit: Viktor Hertz via photopin cc

Attention beloved top-level domains .com, .net. and .xxx: get ready for a lot of company.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) today unveiled the massive list of applications made for the next set of top-level domains (TLDs).

When approved, the additions will greatly expand the number of TLDs from the twenty one offered today, which will in turn create many more possible URLs.

Many of these new TLD will be generic, but a lot will be pinned to specific brands, which means that one day you could find yourself navigating to pages like “Games.Xbox” and “TV.Netflix.”

The biggest push seems to be coming from Google, which applied for over a hundred TLDs. These include unsurprising ones like .book, .cloud., and .drive, as well as some odd choices like .baby, .dad, and .dog.

Apple, Dell, Samsung, Yahoo and a variety of other large companies are also vying for their own TLDs. Amazon, for example, applied for 77 (.shop, .secure), Microsoft applied for 23 (.azure, .hotmail, .skydrive,) and Apple for just one (.Apple). Non-technology companies like Johnson & Johnson and Wal-Mart have jumped in the fray as well.

Many more attempts, however, were made for TLDs like .app, and .inc, and .movie, all of which received multiple applications. Similar to last year’s .xxx efforts, generic, community-based efforts are more likely to receive the most attention and support from ICANN.

Each TLD application runs for eye-popping $185,000, which means that companies like Google have spent millions of dollars pursuing the new TLDs. ICANN itself has netted over $350 million, which goes to show that there’s some serious cash in investing in the future of the Internet.

Woman at computer via Shutterstock

Donuts, the deliciously named domain registry startup, closed a very sweet $100 million mega round of funding, the company announced today.

Donuts is focused on becoming a new registry for generic top-level domains (gTLDs), or the domain extensions that will go beyond simply .com, .net, .org, and others. Regulators have previously capped the total number of gTLDs at 22 total extensions, but that is about to change thanks to a decision by ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) back in June.

So while the startup doesn’t deal in fried, icing-covered pastries it could — hypothetically speaking — eventually provide people with a way to buy domains that end in .bearclaw or .jellyfilled. These particular extensions would make perfect sense for someone who wanted to build a website for their donut shop. The same is true for other categories of business (e.g. .doctor, .chef, .plumber). That doesn’t mean Mr. Donut Shop Owner will be purchasing .bearclaw from Donuts though. The startup plans to sell domain access to third-party commercial registrars like GoDaddy and Tucows.

ICANN anticipates between 300 and 1,000 new TLDs could be created per year under the new domain extension program. For Donuts, that means there’s an opportunity to get a head start on a new business market. The startup has applied to secure and operate over 300 different gTLDs, with a focus on generic words and categories. The Wall Street Journal reports that Donuts hasn’t applied for any gTLDs for locations or trademarks.

Since the market place for gTLDs is still very new, it’s unknown exactly what kind of competition Donuts will face going forward. However, with the rate of gTLDs likely to increase exponentially over the next decade, It’s a good assumption that a “wholesale” domain registry company like Donuts will have plenty of opportunities to generate revenue.

Donuts said it plans to use the new capital primarily ensure winning bids on additional gTLDs, hiring more employees, and marketing its domain service. Also, coffee.

Founded in 2012, the startup has offices in Los Angeles, Calif.; Seattle, Wash.; and Washington, D.C. Donuts currently has eight full-time employees, with plans triple that number over the next year. The round of funding, the startup’s first, was led by Austin Ventures, with participation by Adams Street Partners, Emergence Capital, TL Ventures, Generation Partners, Stahurricane, and others.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple is attempting to take control of the iPhone5.com domain, according to a claim filed with the World Intellectual Property Organization.

Fusible spotted the domain claim today under case number D2012-0951. The decision on the case remains “active.” Currently, iPhone5.com sports a forum on the impending Apple smartphone, a topic that has been ripe with rumors since before the launch of the iPhone 4S. Some are speculating that the iPhone 5 could debut in this fiscal quarter (Apple’s third fiscal quarter), but VentureBeat’s Sean Ludwig says not to count on a launch at the company’s developer conference, WWDC. The conference is being held June 11-15  in San Francisco where Apple says it will “share the latest news about iOS and OS X Mountain Lion.” The latter was recently announced and slated to launch this summer.

More likely, we’ll get a sneak peek at iOS 6 than a whole new phone at WWDC. The latest version of iOS 5 was launched in October 2011.

As MacRumors notes, Apple has generally been slow to grab the domain names for its smartphones. It waited almost a year to take over iPhone4.com, and a few weeks for iPhone4s.com (though, the later was being used to push porn sites to visitors). Perhaps this shows Apple has learned to claim its domains early, despite the potential downside of revealing a product name before debut. The term “iPhone 5,” however, has been so widely used, it’s less of a nod to the product itself, and more likely a company simply trying to control its associations.

via Fusible

The boycott day was organized by users of community news sharing site Reddit last week after Go Daddy appeared on an official congressional list of companies that publicly supported the recently proposed piece of legislation called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). While Go Daddy eventually renounced its support for SOPA on two separate occasions since then, many critics decided to go forward with their boycott efforts.

According to data from domain statistics site DailyChanges, Go Daddy had 27,843 domains transferred into the company’s service yesterday and only 14,492 transferred out. The same positive results show up in Go Daddy’s other statistics, such as the number of new domains (43,304) verses deleted domains (35,907). We’re contacting the company for a confirmation on these numbers, and we’ll update the post with any new information.

If the current boycott efforts aren’t hurting the company’s domain business, which is very large and influential, the negative PR from its involvement with SOPA could still have long-term damaging effects. Plenty of lesser-known domain registrars got a healthy influx of new, loyal customers that aren’t likely to retreat anytime soon — meaning, if nothing else, that Go Daddy’s competition has been strengthened.

For more information about the proposed SOPA legislation , check out VentureBeat’s ongoing SOPA coverage.

[Via TechDirt]

The move marks the biggest change to Internet addresses in nearly four decades. It means companies and other organizations can apply to turn their brands into an internet domain extension, such as “.iPad” or “.Prius”. But it won’t be cheap. Applications for a new TLD will cost an estimated $185,000, according to ICANN’s Frequently Asked Questions page. If approved, there is also an annual $75,000 maintenance fee.

The application process will run from January to April 2012. ICANN, which plans to launch a global campaign to raise awareness of the new TLDs, anticipates between 300 and 1,000 new TLDs could be created under the new application program per year.

ICANN’s plans to lift restrictions on generic TLDs began formulating in 2008. The organization said it felt that expanding the domains would offer people new ways to express themselves and massively increase the “real estate” of domains available for commercial use.

It’s not clear how many companies will feel having their brands as domain names will be worth the costs. While large companies like Google and Coca-Cola may want to snap up a uniquely branded TLD, cyber squatters aren’t likely to participate. ICANN’s lengthy and expensive process should keep only well established brands and organizations in the running for a new domain extension. But it could also deter smaller companies from participating.

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While the purchase was probably a defensive move to prevent others from infringing upon the Reddit brand, it is curious that the company didn’t make this move earlier, especially after all the milestones Reddit has achieved in 2011 alone.

However, this wouldn’t be the first time Conde Nast has taken its sweet time to do things that would be in the best interests of its property.

Reddit has been known to spin-off promotional sites (Reddit gifts, Reddit.tv, Reddit Radio) to interact with its community in many different ways. So there are at least 285 projects that now have domain names associated with them. Some of the more interesting domains include: redditradar.com, redditvision.com, zenreddit.com, and playreddit.com.

Neither Conde Nast nor Reddit has announced any particular plans for the domains.

Image via Bobsworth Industries