With news last week that Google s new holding company, Alphabet, would be doing business at the online corner of ABC and XYZ, Daniel Negari s was in heaven.
Negari, widely described as a visionary Internet mover and shaker, now suddenly possesses an awesome claim to fame: Alphabet is now camped out on the Web at abc.xyz – and Negari owns the property, according to a Reuters report.
I walked over to my team and said this is the biggest thing that could have ever happened to us. I read the message again because it was so surreal, Negari said.
The 29-year-old entrepreneur, who has offices in Beverly Hills and Las Vegas, told Reuters on Monday that XYZ had seen a very large increase in interest for strategic investments as well as total buyout after Google unveiled its new face.
The young CEO, who paid the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) $185,000 to apply for .xyz, told Reuters that while an initial public offering could not be ruled out, the company did not have any immediate plans for it.
Basically, with Google locating its umbrella company on the street called .xyz, Negari s big Internet dream has been firmly validated.
And that new online cred is already paying off, said Reuters: Negari s company, which normally registers 3,000 domain names a day on average, suddenly found itself signing up 30,000 new .xyz domains in the week since the big announcement.
This (Google s announcement) raises the profile to a level that all the marketing and advertising we do all over the world couldn t have taken us to, Negari said.
Negari is all over the Internet. He founded .College, a so-called generic-top-level domain, or gTLD, on the Internet s naming system. According to Wikipedia, Negari created .College as a platform that offers institutions, businesses, and the communities around them to share knowledge and drive innovation. College is an unrestricted domain extension that allows for people and organizations of all types to come together for a common purpose and a common future.
According to fusion.net, Negari was hard at work at the offices of .XYZ in Santa Monica when golden sparkle dust fell from the skies:
He was having a run-of-the-mill day fielding requests for new .xyz websites when he got a message from a friend that read, Congrats on abc.xyz. He headed to the URL and discovered that Google CEO Larry Page had just used it to announce the launch of a its new home was abc.xyz.
I was shaking, Negari told me. The biggest thing that could have ever happened happened.
Negari said he had paid $185,000 for the .xyz domain, which otherwise could have gone to auction and demanded a sky-high price. Consider .app, for which Google paid a record-setting $25 million, says Fusion.
By charging folks a small annual fee of eight bucks to set up a business on his .xyz, Negari now stands to make some real dough thanks to Google (Neither Google nor Negari would divulge details of negotiations to rent out a space to Alphabet). Fusion, god bless them, did the math:
Before Google s announcement, .xyz was fielding roughly 3,000 new registrations a day, he says. Now it s closer to 20,000. At $8 a pop, that amounts to $160,000 a day. That s a good business! In addition to the initial $185,000 Negari coughed up for .xyz, Negari pays just $6,250 in quarterly fees to ICANN, plus an additional $0.25 per registered website (which kicks in after a domain racks up more than 50,000 of them).
Negari, laughing all the way to the bank, has apparently now mastered his ABCs.
Credit: SiliconBeat.com
