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Ulvi
Kasimov
.ART Founder |
The
.ART
registry is one those that have put it all
together and are now, five years after
launch, reaping the rewards from
their hard work and financial investment.
.ART is obviously a great keyword to begin
with, representing a massive market that has
only gotten bigger on the Internet over the
past couple of years with the emergence of NFT
art. It has such great natural
appeal that it became one of the three
most highly contested TLDs when ICANN
opened the rights up for auction.
The
auction winner was Ulvi Kasimov, a
venture investor and patron of the arts,
whose company UK Creative Ideas Limited
(UKCI) became the operator of .ART and
launched the TLD in December 2016. By
the the time .ART went into General
Availability in May 2017 it already had a
user base filled with some of the world's
biggest names in art, entertainment and
business. They included The Louvre,
Sotheby’s, TATE, Centre Pompidou, MAXXI
Museum, Beyoncé, Banksy, Rolex, BMW, Apple,
Google and Bank of America Merrill Lynch, to
name just a few. You can see a fascinating
list of .ART's
top adopters here (.pdf file).
With
so many celebrated supporters and the
built-in credibility of the name itself,
.ART has now attracted over 177,000
registrants, which puts them among the top
3% of all new gTLD registries. They are
also ranked among the |
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10
fastest growing registries, in part
because the TLD is much more affordable than
it was in its early years when $50 a year
general registrations were common. As of
this writing, at popular registrar Dynadot,
.ART registrations have a base rate of
$12.99 and are just $5.99 for the first
year. |
In
another sign of good health, .ART, who is
headquartered in London with additional offices in
Los Angeles, Moscow and Beijing, has an overall
renewal rate of 63%. That soars to 85%
for the more than 13,000 premium domains they
have sold. While premium domains are a key source of
revenue, accounting for 69% of the registry's
income, only 5% of their domains have carried
a premium price, insuring that the vast majority of
domains are available to registrants around the
world at standard rates.
I mentioned NFTs opening up a whole new world
for .ART but that is just part of the
ground-breaking path the registry is on. .ART is now
a patent holder for its Digital
Twin solution. The .art Digital
Twin is a digital certificate of authenticity
that can be applied to any art or cultural object.
It provides an easy to understand, easy to use
solution for storing valuable artwork information,
including any kind of media that could confirm its
value and illustrate the creativity behind it. Using
the international Object IDTM standard
developed by the Getty Trust, the DNS &
blockchain acts as an expansive, distributed, secure
data holder.
.ART
has also launched its own crypto
wallet solution, allowing you to send
crypto directly to registered domains using .ART
domains. Instead of typing out an incredibly long
crypto address, you have the option to simply type
in an easy-to-remember domain like annieswallet.art
– with a synergetic security of ENS and DNS used
in
parallel.
.ART
also provides a free, easy to use website builder
to help artists establish a memorable web address
and establish a website for displaying their work.
Anyone with a .ART domain can build their
online presence in a few clicks. The relatively
simple web pages can serve as a sort of digital
business card, or as a communication hub that is
used as an entry point for all platforms used by the
owner, from Medium to TikTok.
Mr.
Kasimov said, “This has truly been a remarkable
period. Since its launch, .ART has grown into a
fully-fledged brand acknowledged by the artistic
community, thanks to every single one of our
adopters. Our latest partnerships with CADAF
and Ars
Electronica and the added context of the
pandemic have shown new horizons, so we will
keep up the innovatory spirit. We are already
looking for new tools and novel ways to act as an
activation agent to connect tech, art and
finance – digitally, but on a human scale.”
For
an illuminating complete account of Mr. Kasimov's personal
quest for the .ART TLD, you will want to read
his comments in this exclusive
interview published on the Art.art blog
in 2019. In another interesting read, check
out the
history of the .ART registry here. |
