Tinfoil hats anyone?
Can’t share some positive news with the domainer world these days; the usual conspiracy theorists march in, attempting to scatter glitter around. 😉
No sooner had we announced the great hand-registration and rapid development of the domain Credit.Club by Bruce Marler, that a discussion thread on a forum for gTLD domains, attempted to tear Marler’s good fortune apart.
“I love a good conspiracy theory and this one sounds legit. There is no way that name passed through all the way to the whois reg date of 1-14-2015.“, says one commentator, while another chimes in: “for sure he bought it like the others (coffee, vegas) the site is up and running”
Being a Doubting Thomas isn’t exactly news in the domain industry; many people are in disbelief when someone succeeds in breaking the mold by means of good fortune and hard work.
Other commentators in that discussion appear understanding, and even Bruce Marler himself joined in to explain that there is no hidden agenda or any other manipulation of the registration process:
“I hate to disappoint, but there is no conspiracy. I have the invoice, my wife and I were at the Admirals Club in the Chicago airport starting to research domains and some items related to a couple domains I got at auction at NamesCon. I was just reviewing how much some of the various finance .club domains were priced at. I have been a big fan of the growth of the lending/credit P2P services (such as LendingClub) so I specifically had been looking for credit related finance domains. I wanted to see how high this one was priced at. I had to double check it, triple checked it, then added it my cart with a few domains my wife had chose as well, did not tell her, let her go order sushi and then told her what just happened.
Went home, made sure it was still there the next day (because really, it had to be a dream right…) and then decided to develop at least some level of a site on it over the weekend. Seemed to be a good tie in with our WP dev sessions at NamesCon and the gtld focus at NamesCon (and the success of the .club auctions there). Ordered my content, and then started building it.”
And yet, the tinfoil hat bearers continue to rant:
“Just a coincidence how after returning from Namescon your the only one who managed to find a generic gtld which would be priced at least $15,000 for reg fee, and how .club didn’t put out a release like uniregistry explaining how this happened, or could be the least bit concerned some of their generics had leaked into general registration. Yet they retweet credit.club registered without any remorse on being compensated, but are upset for receiving $140,000 for wine.club”
Of course, silly arguments don’t understand that a gTLD domain Registry does not always police their inventory effectively, nor every Registry operates in a manner that follows the same protocol.
In a statement to DomainGang, Jeff Sass – CMO of the .CLUB registry – said:
“We TRULY had nothing to do with it. I wish we did!”, adding:
“Every day I see premium quality names that are hand registered, that were not reserved by us. There are great opportunities to hand register keywords and other great names. We did not reserve everything.”
Bruce told us that he initially had WHOIS privacy on, which he turned back off to be able to add the domain to Sedo.
Below is the receipt from the registration of Credit.Club, for a whopping $10.99 at Name.com. The same invoice includes the domain Winery.Life for three times as much!
The invoice for Credit.Club and Winery.Life
