Price Increase is Bad for Registrars

Elliot Silver
-
8

Like most others in the domain investment business, I read the news about the Uniregistry price increases on Domain Incite and Domain Name Wire  yesterday afternoon. As the owner of fewer than 10 domain names that are new extensions, the price increase will not directly impact my business. The businesses most impacted by this will be domain name registrars who will have to pass along the price increase to customers.

I would imagine that domain name registrars are going to be tasked with informing customers of the large price increase. From my perspective, it would not be fair for these registrars to simply send out a renewal reminder email to registrants and sort of bury the fact that prices for some new domain names are going way, way up. I think they are going to have to make sure domain registrants know that the prices of some domain names will be rising (dramatically).

Unfortunately, the domain name business is not exactly transparent. Even if GoDaddy and other domain registrars explain that the upstream registry raised its prices, domain registrants are still going to have to pay GoDaddy, and they will likely be upset with GoDaddy if they care about their domain names. Once domain registrars begin sending these notification emails, recipients may worry about other new extensions as well, even those not currently impacted by the price increases. This is not good for the new gTLD business, particularly the domain registrars whose customers will face these dramatic price changes.

Another area that could cause some reputational damage

Read More

Getting Your TLD Legal in China: the MIIT Process Unboxed

Simon Cousins
-
5

Emblem_of_Ministry_of_Industry_and_Information_TechnologyFor some registries, it has been a more than four-year process to get their TLDs approved by China’s regulator, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (the enigmatic “MIIT”). However, with slow but steady MIIT approvals now coming out of China, what started with the MIIT’s policy revision some years ago, to the appointment of the equally abstruse “review committee” last year, has now resulted in “approved” foreign registries now legally selling their domains in China. While this is certainly good news, the process leading to MIIT approval is still a formidable one.

As the China-specialist agency which was hired to support the successful applications of .club, .ink, .shop, .site and .vip, the ‘coming soon’ applications of .art, Famous Four, Neustar (.biz & .co), Rightside, and the original China market entry of the Chinese IDNs .在线 and .中文网, Allegravita is unambiguously the most experienced China domain registry consultant in the world. Elliot Silver of DomainInvesting.com asked us to write an update on the complicated process of applying for and receiving MIIT approval, so we hope this overview is of interest to the domain name industry.

Selling domains in China to Chinese registrants and investors not only represents clear opportunities for registries in “DUMs and Dollars”, but equally requires the registry to commit substantial time, capital and other resources. The decision to commit to China is all the more daunting because of vast cultural, linguistic, and regulatory unknowns.

Admittedly, China’s is a difficult system for an outsider to navigate for all these factors, and also because China operates in a complex “Chinese knot” woven tightly with red tape. However, as the recent TLD approvals show, the process is not an insurmountable one if you select your China partners carefully, and navigate the process according to a clear roadmap.

Read on to understand the main checkpoints on that roadmap.

5225998268_a63f357c20_z

“Chinese Knot” by Flickr user Qiaomeng. Creative Commons license.

I want a woofie? What the what is a woofie?

Read More

Google Search Results for Domain Name a Bit Surprising

Elliot Silver
-
7

I was curious what companies rank in the top ten Google results for “domain name” and it had been quite some time since I last checked out the rankings. I was a bit surprised by the top results I found when I did an incognito mode search this morning.

Below the top advertisements, here are the ten results that appear when I searched Google for the domain name term:

  • Register.com
  • GoDaddy
  • Wikipedia
  • Wix
  • Google Domains
  • Namecheap
  • (Top Stories – News Link)
  • DomainName.com
  • Network Solutions
  • InstantDomainSearch.com

I found this list to be

Read More

Poll: Tennis.com vs. Golf.com

Elliot Silver
-
14

Golf.com vs. Tennis.comYesterday evening, I wrote about the pending sale of Tennis.com. The domain name, which includes a highly developed business, is part of an $8 million + earn out deal to a publicly traded company.

In the comment section, someone mentioned Golf.com, which is also a highly developed business. That got me thinking about which domain name is more valuable.

From my uneducated perspective, I think people spend more money on golf equipment, travels, private clubs, lessons, and other aspects of the sport. People spend quite a bit of money on tennis as well, but I would imagine the spend is significantly higher for golf. Looking at the basics, a set of golf clubs is far more than one tennis racquet and greens fees + cart rental cost significantly more than court time. This makes me believe there is more money with golf and likely the Golf.com domain name because of advertisers.

Personally, I would prefer to own

Read More

How I Used Estibot’s Bulk Appraisal Tool

Elliot Silver
-
29

EstibotEstibot is a somewhat polarizing tool. Some people use Estibot regularly, and some people are vocal about its shortcomings. I would not say that I am a regular Estibot user, but I want to share how I found it to be helpful for me.

I was in the process of buying a few  domain names from a large portfolio owner. In looking to do an even larger deal, I asked if I could have a list of their portfolio for review. I was sent this very large list with tens of thousands of .com domain names. I tried to look through the list on my own, but I couldn’t really focus. I did find a few good domain names, but I was sure that I would miss some of the better names, and if I was going to be able to do a large deal, I wanted to have the best chance of picking out the top names.

I re-signed up for an Estibot account and paid a hair under $150  for a month of access. I had to sign up for a more expensive account because of the number of names I wanted appraised and the short time period I had to appraise them all. I input the names 10,000 at a time and reviewed each .CSV file with the full appraisal information.

I was able to scan through

Read More

Report: Elon Musk Acquires BoringCompany.com via HugeDomains

Elliot Silver
-
10

In December, serial entrepreneur Elon Musk tweeted about starting a tunnel boring company to potentially create a remedy to bad traffic. When Musk tweets something, others listen and TechCrunch even published an article about Musk’s tweet back in December.

According to a report published in Bloomberg, it looks like Musk has followed through with this tweet and is in the process of starting a literal boring company. The article states that “Within days of his tweetstorm, he acquired a domain name—BoringCompany.com—and appointed a leader for the project.”

The current Whois information for

Read More
1...757677...154Page 76 of 154