Why Google's Move to Alphabet Just Changed This Man's Life
Google's restructuring means the purchase of more than a few domains from Daniel Negari's web domain registry, XYZ.com.
By Ari Levy •
This story originally appeared on CNBC
Here's one giant winner in Google's rebranding announcement: Daniel Negari.
Negari is the founder and CEO of XYZ.com, an Internet domain registry that owns alternative suffixes like .rent and .college. His 10-person company also owns .xyz.
Abc.xyz is the web address for Google's new parent entity, Alphabet Inc.
"Our registry is lighting up right now," said Negari, in an interview Monday afternoon following Google's announcement. "I'm seeing all kinds of names being registered. I just got 250 names registered in the last 60 seconds. It's crazy."
In a full day, Negari said about 3,000 addresses are typically registered under .xyz. Domains with that extension can be purchased from services such as GoDaddy for $10 a year and Namecheap for a first-year fee of $1.
Negari is cashing in thanks to a 2011 decision by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) designed to expand access to extensions beyond .com, .org and .edu. The market opened up to those websites in 2014.
Of the more than 350 new extensions that are now available, .xyz is by far the most popular, with 1.14 million domains having been registered, according to nTLDstats. The next most active is .science with over 326,000, followed by .club with over 278,000.
Negari, who turned on .xyz to the public in June 2014, declined to say how much Google paid for abc.xyz, citing a confidentiality agreement. To acquire the .xyz extension, Negari paid a mere $185,000 application fee. There were no other applicants, so Negari didn't have to bid in an auction.
A spokesperson from Mountain View, California-based Google said "we have nothing to add here."
Google announced on Monday a dramatic restructuring that breaks out the Web giant's core business into a separate company under a new umbrella called Alphabet. Other companies that will be part of Alphabet are the life sciences unit and Calico, which is focused on longevity.
Larry Page, co-founder and CEO of Google, will assume the CEO role of Alphabet, with Google co-founder Sergey Brin serving as president. Sundar Pichai, head of product and engineering, is now CEO of Google. Alphabet is replacing Google as the publicly-traded entity.
Currently, abc.xyz is just a landing page, with a letter from Page explaining the changes and some blocks with letters.
That's providing plenty of attention for Negari.
"It's a big deal for new top-level domains as a whole," said Negari, who has operations in Santa Monica, California, and Las Vegas. "It's a big signal that Google, which is the largest search engine in the world, believes in it enough to switch to one."
