I don't recall what our application fee was for .name back in 2000, but it was somewhere well below a million (I want to say $50k or something, but it might have been more), so yeah, a lot easier to make a go of it for operators back then (We also had to provide funding guarantees from our investors for a few million, but those were funds that would flow into our company, so very different)

Of course ".name" also eventually ended up with Verisign after sales fell short of expectations (I still wish we'd held onto the vanity e-mail service we started out with instead - I wanted to hold on until we'd started charging to see what the conversion rates would be; the company we sold it to ended up achieving conversion rates that made it far more profitable than .name; oh well)

They start dirt cheap and invite in the domain name squatters. After the first year they start increasing the renewal rate quarterly.

Let's say they want a ten year payback, and profit $20 a year on a .web domain, they need to sell about 625,000 domain names.

Mostly it’s hard to imagine how little money a million dollars is nowadays. $135 million is a small side bet or a few NFTs