Considering .asia and .tel results, how many domains can a new TLD expect to register?

What makes a top level domain name successful?

If you compare any top level domain to .com, they are all failures. But if you look at it from the registry’s perspective, the number required to be profitable isn’t that much.

.Biz brings in about $12 million a year to registry Neustar even though .biz is only tiny sliver of the domain market at two million domains. That’s not bad.

I’ve been told that some business plans for new top level domains anticipate registration levels of only about 35,000. That’s not much, and I suspect many general domains can get that many registrations in defensive registrations alone. But if it’s marketed to a niche community, that can be profitable.

So let’s look at numbers for a couple recent top level domains, .asia and .tel (I’ve already written about .mobi).

In its latest public ICANN report, .tel registry Telnic reported a total of 221,616 domains registered in July. The number seems to be growing 5,000-15,000 names a month. Recent estimates I’ve heard are that there are about 250,000 .tel domains registered, which jives with the current growth rate. But keep in mind .tel will take a hit after initial registration periods lapse.

.Asia has already seen its first round of drops from its land rush, and is now hovering at about 215,000 domains registered.

Neither of these TLDs faced intense competition when they were launched, and they are also fairly generic in nature. When new TLDs are launched en masse, they’ll face stiff competition with other similar TLDs. That means they’ll be lucky to approach the numbers .asia and .tel have, unless they manage to score good shelf space at a registrar like GoDaddy (or are launched by a registrar for that matter).

I’ve never had a first hand look at a business plan for a new TLD, but I hope their backers are being cautious with their forecasts.

Registered base of .mobi domains is sinking.

The total number of .mobi domain names registered fell to 850,712 in July 2009, the latest number available through ICANN. That represents a 10% drop from the same month in 2008 when the total base was 946,357.

The number of .mobi domains registered has held stagnate this year, hanging around 850,000 domains.

.Mobi has been one of the best marketed new top level domain names to ever be released. A couple months ago I was surprised to see people calling out mTLD for not promoting the domain more. I suspect these people are more frustrated about resale values of the domain than mTLD’s marketing. mTLD has marketed the heck out of the domain, released software to support domain registrants, hooked up with GoDaddy (which has registered about half of all .mobi domains) and forged alliances with mobile device makers.

That said, it looks like 850,000 may be the ongoing magic number for .mobi domain registrations. A lot of people bought .mobi domain names for speculation, and with the resale market faltering, it’s unlikely to see a surge in new registrations for the domain.

Later today I’ll post numbers from .asia and .tel to show how those domains are performing.

[Update: as one reader pointed out, .mobi got a boost of about 100,000 domains recently with the launch of certain IDN domains. See comments.]

Domain name renewal scam resurfaces.

A domain renewal “scam” that I first wrote about in 2007 has surfaced again.

The e-mail scam comes from an outfit calling itself ISP renewal aka Domain Renewal, and informs you that your domain name is expiring. The company misleads domain registrants to think they need to renew their domain through ISP renewal, but the fine print says that “Domain Renewal monitors domain names and renews your domain names through your existing Internet service provider.”

A link in the email forwards you to a payment page at DomainRenewal-Online.org offering renewal for $79.95. The page includes logos of major internet companies including Cisco, IBM, and Oracle.

Apparently I’m not the only one getting these scam emails today.

Group submits plan to takeover Fabulous‘ parent company.

Photon Group has submitted its formal share purchase statement (pdf) for its planned purchase of outstanding Dark Blue Sea shares. Dark Blue Sea is the parent company of domain name registrar and parking company Fabulous.

Photon owns almost 30% of the outstanding shares in the company. In a letter to shareholders, Photon Group Executive Chairman Tim Hughes says the offer represents a premium to the average share price prior to the company’s buyout announcement. It also represents 16 times Dark Blue Sea’s FY2009 earnings before interest, taxes, and impairment.

Photon gives a number of reasons for shareholders to sell out, including:

Under current management there has been a significant deterioration in the business and future profitability is uncertain. In the last two years, there has been significant declines in the profitability and share price of DBS. In FY2009, reported net profit after tax fell by 74%. This followed a 24% decline in reported net profit
after tax in FY2008…

Notwithstanding this poor performance, the DBS Board has not provided DBS Shareholders with any clear direction or strategy for the recovery of the business. Further, DBS management has an unproven track record at executing any alternative business plans required for the recovery of the business.

The offer will close sometime in December, provided that Photon is able to purchase enough shares to own 50.1% of the company and there are no major occurrences.

If Photon acquires a controlling stake in the company, it plans to insert two Photon employees onto the board of the company. It will then conduct a review of the business “for the purpose of identifying ways in which DBS can enhance its business and the underlying value of its domains.”

DBS management is asking shareholders to take no further action until it has a chance to review the offer details.

Critical customer mistakes often blamed on domain registrars.

When online backup service CrashPlan.com went down earlier this month, the company was quick to blame its domain name registrar GoDaddy. Code 42 Software, which runs the CrashPlan.com service, tweeted about how GoDaddy “mistakenly removed our root nameserver entry”, “inappropriately took over our DNS”, and did a DNS “hijack”.

What Code 42 Software never tweeted was that it had mistakenly let the domain name expire. The outage was Code 42’s fault, not GoDaddy’s.

None of the previous five e-mails GoDaddy sent to Code 42 Software alerting them to the impending expiration got the company’s attention.

The myth that GoDaddy was to blame then spread across the web. One commenter on an unrelated CNET story wrote that “GoDaddy somehow hosed their domain.” (Code 42 Software did not respond to a request for comment for this story.)

Domain registrars frequently get thrown under the bus when one of their customers makes a mistake. In another case, a registrant of a popular web site had their non-Go Daddy email account compromised, which allowed an attacker to steal their domain name by transferring it away from GoDaddy. The customer publicly blamed GoDaddy, even though the problem was with the customer’s e-mail security.

GoDaddy deals with the brunt of attacks like this, given its massive size and mass market strategy. But other registrars feel the heat, too. Earlier this year fingers were pointed at eNom when several high value domain names were stolen. The real culprit? The customer used a weak password, allowing the thief to access their account.

Companies with popular web sites have a number of added tools they should use to protect against many of the most common domain problems. Moniker and Fabulous offer domain locking tools with added security. GoDaddy offers Protected Registration. Companies should also subscribe to DomainTools’ Registrant Alert to find out about potential theft quickly. The sidebar of this story has other tips for protecting your domain names.

The difficulty for domain registrars is how quickly misinformation spreads across the web. It doesn’t matter that it was Code 42’s fault that CrashPlan.com went down. It doesn’t matter that it wasn’t the registrar’s fault that a domain was stolen. Just the accusation, combined with the viral nature of social media, can damage a registrar’s reputation.