eNom offers promotional pricing on domain.
If you’ve been sitting on the sidelines for the .tel top level domain name, your patience may have been rewarded: eNom is now offering the domains for only $2.99 per year under promotional pricing.
.tel domain names don’t function like normal top level domains. Instead, it’s sort of like a business card on the web. You can upload content such as your contact information, links to other web sites, etc. on the domains. Recently functionality was added to insert Google Adsense ads onto the domains as well.
Will lower pricing spur demand for the domain? It’s hard to tell. The domain was launched a little over a year ago, so the TLD just experienced its first major drop cycle. As of the end of last year about 265,000 .tel domains were registered. And with hundreds of new TLDs coming onto the market in a couple years, competition is about to get much more fierce.
George Kirikos says
New TLD operators talk about all the “innovation” they’re going to unleash if ICANN just approves their TLD. Even registry operators like Demand Media (.tv) Afilias (.info) and Neustar (.biz) who already manage TLDs. Hilarious, since we don’t see it in the TLDs they’ve already got.
This move by Telnic shows they’ve run out of ideas. First we saw the “pump” and now we see the “dump” as they drop prices. Next thing you know, they’ll start giving them away. Then, in a few years, like .pro, .jobs and .travel, they’ll seek favourable contractual amendments from ICANN, because otherwise they can’t go on. And you’ll see new TLD advocates ask ICANN to lower fees, so that they can continue to wring out every last drop from suckers before the final death spiral (hmmm, .name).
At least the number of suckers who’ve wasted their money has been declining for each new TLD launch.
Andy says
@George This seems to be one registrar offering an exclusive price through resellers. It presumably won’t last forever, and eNom will hope to more than make up for it in renewals at their regular price 🙂
g says
waste money
A. Mitchell says
This promotion may not extend to all eNom customers. As a BulkRegister member, I’m being offered a $12.95 price.
Andrew Allemann says
@ A. Mitchell – eNom “resellers” need to sign up for the promotion
Amy says
@ A. Mitchell – eNom “resellers” need to sign up for the promotion
M. Menius says
I agree with the criticims about “new innovation” being introduced into the market by new tld’s. This is a weak, non-existent, and pumped-up rationale. No real substance.
There is a huge, huge gap between the hype of new tld’s and the reality of new tld’s being widely adopted by society. We have seen very clearly & exactly how the market reacts to new tld releases. There’s no mystery. We all know exactly how the market has reacted and will react to more tld releases … and that reaction is one of near relative indifference.
With the exception of initial domainer excitement and fervor, a new tld release will not magically garner widepsread support and adoption.
At this point in time, the slow growth, grass roots up model is the only one that is viable (like what eventually evolved with .info and .biz). These tld’s took a long time to move forward and go beyond pure domainer investment. The business world have to buy in and/or large groups of non-domainers.
Tom Barrett says
I actually feel .tel is one of the few innovations in new gtlds. Rather than use the typical html-type websites, they auto-generate websites from records in the DNS. Admitedly though, this is a difference that the Registry has not explained very clearly.
.name was actually another innovation but they lost patience with their original model.
Innovation isn’t easy, but I have faith that there will be a few innovations in the up-coming rounds as well.
Tom Barrett
EnCirca
Andrew Allemann says
@ Tom – I agree. I’d say .tel is innovative. Whether or not the .tel innovation is needed or not is the question.
One of the problems with .tel is it remains very technical in nature rather than simple, which I believe was the point.
John McCormac says
The volume of .tel drops from the Landrush anniversary Junk Dump won’t really be clear until late May. If the bulk of .tel registrations were brand protection registrations then it should not be too bad for Telnic.
The .name gTLD may have been innovative when it was launched (the ccTLDs were not quite the .com competitors then that they are today) but the launch of .me has effectively replaced it as an ego driven domain purchase. The power of Godaddy as a signifcant market player shows that it is essential for a new gTLD to have Godaddy on its side.
The danger of registries running slash and burn price promotions during the Junk Dump phase of a TLD’s lifecycle is that it creates an almost Subprime problem in that it delays natural attrition rather than completely eliminating it. The historical figures for .info gTLD show a massive boom and bust registration pattern with low price/free promotions resulting in a spike in registrations and then, a year or two later, a massive drop of these registrations. However .info has a reasonable number of registrations. The growth of .biz has been far steadier. The growth in .asia fell dramatically after its initial landrush and it now has the growth pattern of a small ccTLD.
Most of the new gTLDs will have the same problems as .asia and .tel in getting market share. Most of them will become zombie TLDs (zTLDs perhaps). A few will do well and they may do so by capitalising on some existing market (large city gTLDs) or some new market or popular innovation. The bubble mentality that drove the initial uptake of new TLDs (.eu/.mobi/.asia/.tel) between 2005 and 2008 just isn’t there now.
miked says
.com is still a wasteland.. i will never get these new tlds
Mike says
All TLD are the same, except .tel
Until you can appreciate no need to build a web site, or
blazing page load times, mobile and search optimized
out of the box domains…then you won’t
If on the other hand you can’t seem to appreciate those qualities then I can see why you’d bet against it. However, as soon as Joe the Plummer
figures out he won’t need to be swindled by some
pimple faced kind selling templated web sites for $10,000 each; we will have hit will a game changing moment.
Till then a tough road to travel but certainly not hopeless
Justin Hayward says
Just a point of clarification here to one of your readers. Telnic has yet to run a price promotion. This price promotion is being run by eNom to introduce its resellers to .tel and it’s a decision that Telnic has not been involved in. In order to understand its differentiation point, every reseller signing up to the price promotion will need to view a training video and utilize the marketing materials supplied by eNom.
And no, we haven’t run out of ideas just yet.
Regards,
Justin
Telnic Limited
http://justin.tel
Andrew Allemann says
@ Justin – so eNom is selling below its cost?
Justin Hayward says
It’s selling below the wholesale price, yes.
Andrew Allemann says
@ Justin – thanks for the info. That actually makes this more interesting.