When it comes to the new domain names, GoDaddy is probably going to play one of the greatest roles in consumer adoption. GoDaddy is the largest domain name registrar, and as a result, the company will present the new gTLD domain names to millions of consumers. I believe the company’s marketing efforts will be critical to consumer awareness, and there’s a lot of money at stake.
Earlier this month, GoDaddy opened pre-registrations on four domain extensions: .Build, .Luxury, .Uno, and .Menu. Prices to pre-register domain names ranged from $40 to $1,200 (price is refundable less the application fee if name isn’t secured). Shortly after the company began offering pre-registrations, I reached out to ask if the company would share some trends and perhaps some information about the number of pre-registrations.
Last night, I received an email from GoDaddy with some trends the company is seeing. Here are some of these trends:
- Domainers are in the minority as percentage of buyers (Only 7% of total units purchased)
- Price points matter – Registries with more affordable price are moving more domain names
- .MENU has more than 10x the number of units sold than .LUXURY
- As we expected, pre-registered names are relevant to the respective domain name extension, e.g.:
- .BUILD has a lot of names related to construction industry
- .UNO has a lot of Spanish language names
I think other extensions are going to see more action from domain investors, so the low purchase rate from domain investors isn’t a big surprise to me. I think more generic TLDs like .Shop or .Web will have more speculation.
What are your thoughts on the trends GoDaddy has reported?
What defnines a DOMAINER in regards to Godaddy’s analysis… based on my dealings with end users in the past, most are clueless of the current state of domains, and how to put them to work, let alone forward thinking of new gtld’s. Numbers would have been much easier to digest with than X FACTORS. I think .luxury was right around $799 or so…
My guess is they consider domain investors those with a specific number of domain names or more, or perhaps those with portfolios of domain names that park them. Not 100% sure.
I imagine many of the sales are upsells or cross-sells.
A few months ago GD asked you how you classify yourself after logging in. One option was to pick that you were a domain name investor…
I have pre-registered about 10 domains, and godaddy has come back after holding my money for weeks with a refund on at least 5 stating that the register has decided to withhold certain domain names. There seems to be some fort of unbalance with these registrations, I’ll likely see those names I tried to register on the market later for a large fee!!!
It is a shamble!
Pre-order New gTLD money collecting scheme works great. .STARTUP pre-orders reached 2000 domains for 2 days (0.99$ each).