Reviewing the numbers behind DomainMonster’s claim.
Yesterday domain name registrar DomainMonster.com sent out a press release “UK Company Confirmed as World’s Largest New Domain Name Supplier“. According to the release,
Measured by the largest number of domains registered in the first month of public door opening at a domain registry, the closest retail competitor was US based Go-Daddy, some 36% behind Domainmonster.com.
It may come as a surprise that a relatively unknown domain name registrar topped Go Daddy by such a large margin. I think we should run this one through analysis like those political fact-checking sites.
There have basically been two gTLD launches in the past two years: .asia and .tel. The first gotcha is that Go Daddy doesn’t offer .tel domain names, so that gives DomainMonster a leg up to begin with. The second is that the data is limited to just one month after the launch of the new domains.
I can’t get my numbers to match up with the company’s 36% lead over Go Daddy, but looking into the numbers shows that the stat is misleading.
First for .Tel. As I said, Go Daddy doesn’t offer .tel, so it’s number is 0. I’m not sure which month DomainMonster used for its .tel data. But in April 2009, which I believe is the first month after general availability of .tel, its parent company Mesh Digital registered 3,675 .tel domain names. In March they registered 10,938. (I’m assuming the company only has one accredited registrar.)
For the other gTLD launch, .asia, Go Daddy outsold DomainMonster 2 or 3x each month around the launch. In April 2008, Go Daddy sold 10,728 .asia domain names through GoDaddy.com and its reseller program, compared to 4,051 for DomainMonster. March and May numbers have a similar ratio between the two companies.
If you look at how many .asia domains the companies sold during the first calendar year, Go Daddy outsold Domain Monster 3-to-1.
So from a fact-check standpoint, the press release lands somewhere in the middle: technically true, but misleading.
That’s not to say DomainMonster.com is a bad company. On the contrary, they have done a great job teaming up with registries as they launch new TLDs. You may have seen their booth at one of the many domain conferences.
But if you want to know which company will sell more of a new TLD head-to-head, put your money on those guys in Scottsdale.
John McCormac says
The only thing that is apparent is that url in the press release promoting the release of .co domains. Just comparing the stats for domaincontrol.com (Godaddy’s main nameservers) and domainmonster.com shows magnitudes of difference. Getting in on the ground floor of a new gTLD launch takes advantage of the landrush fever. Many of these domain registrations are one year wonders and tend to be dropped on the anniversary of the landrush. As new TLDs, the .asia and .tel sTLDs have not exactly caught the imagination of the public. The real registration volume is still globally in .com registrations. But for a UK company, the .uk registration figures should be the baseline. Claiming to be the biggest registrar in a new fourth choice gTLD is like claiming to have won the “World’s Tallest Midget” contest. Like most advertising, it requires a certain suspension of the critical faculties.
Matt Mansell says
Thanks for the analysis. The numbers are accurate.
Feel free to get in touch and we can provide the supporting data. To help you do the math, its Based upon March and April data combined for each launch year and 1 year new creates (Therefore GA), so a little more than a month after each General Availability (GA). This is stated in the release.
Yes Go-Daddy didn’t choose to participate in .tel so receive a 0 for that, both launches being broadly the same size at launch.
Our release isn’t intended to pick holes in any of our friends at other registrars or we would of released a wider set of data. Actually Go-Daddy sat 3rd overall, but closest in terms of the retail space.
We are clearly keen to highlight our success, factually and fairly. GA is when it counts. That’s sensible pricing at launch and when the bulk of names get secured, so one month past GA is a fair measure. Including both gTLD launches in the time frame is of course equally fair (Accepted there have been two) whether participating or not.
Hope that helps provide a balanced view and thank you for your kind words.
Andrew Allemann says
Thanks Matt. My numbers kept showing a higher difference between you and GoDaddy because I was using just one month of data.
John McCormac says
This is the historical growth for Godaddy’s domaincontrol.com nameservers:
http://www.hosterstats.com/HistoricalDomainStatistics.php?hoster=domaincontrol.com
This is the historical growth for domainmonster.com’s domainmonster.com nameservers:
http://www.hosterstats.com/HistoricalDomainStatistics.php?hoster=domainmonster.com
There is a huge gulf between the two hosters. In sheer volume of registrations over a basket of TLDs, Godaddy is typically one of the global market leaders. The growth curve for new gTLDs after their landrush period generally falls away dramatically from the halcyon days of the landrush. The growth curve for .asia showed this massive fall-off to such an extent that it is now displaying the growth characteristics of a small ccTLD.
http://www.hosterstats.com/Detailed-asia-Statistics-2008.php
So domainmonster.com did well in the launch of .asia and .tel sTLDs. The problem is that the bulk of domain registration globally is concentrated in .com TLD and the bulk of UK registrations are concentrated in .co.uk registrations. In terms of new domains, Godaddy has been had 927834 new com/net/org/biz/info/mobi domains between 01/February/2010 and 01/March/2010. The new domain count for domainmonster.com in the same gTLDs was 2051 domains. The net growth for domainmonster.com over these gTLDs in the period was 1451 domains. The net growth for Godaddy over the same period and gTLDs was 513275 domains. Perhaps domainmonster.com has more on its 37 nameservers than just the *.domainmonster.com nameservers (it had a November 2009 count of 6851 in .asia as Mesh Digital Limited) but in terms of growth and marketshare, Godaddy is the significant player in the global market.
Domainmonster.com/Mesh Digital Limited may have done well in some new gTLDs that have had less than massive success but having a few thousand new domains registered just doesn’t compare with having a footprint of tens of millions of domains. While the press release may be accurate in the claims about these new minor gTLDs, it is very misleading because Godaddy and quite a few other registrars massively outnumber Mesh Digital Limited in the number of new domains they register individually each month. The headline of the press release is quite wrong.
Matt Mansell says
Thanks John. We don’t dispute Go-Daddy are the worlds largest registrar by growth and volume when looking at the gTLD space overall. Of course that position is going to exist with incumbent registrars and domain spaces. There were 8million names ish in 2000 and 180million now. That’s why we wanted to talk about recency – what’s happening with new launch marketing in todays world.
Our release is about new gTLDs released in the past two years – nothing more. To help inform those interested in the name spaces that are appearing now via ccTLDs and set for the imminent horizon with ICANNs plans. Particularly at GA launch – where it counts for getting the good name space while you can at sensible pricing.
Regardless of Whether you are a supporter of anything other than a .com is a different debate. Offline I’d be happy to discuss the economics of ICANNs plans here, so feel free to get in touch.
There are a couple of other worthy points here that my first comment didn’t really highlight and feel I should to do us justice:
1) Domainmonster are regularly in the top 25 fastest growing nowadays out of 940 odd ICANN registrars. One would therefore hope being in the top 3 percentile doesn’t make us so un-known anymore 🙂
2) A worthy note is that ccTLDs launches aren’t included in our numbers. If you could get each of these launches to formally release their numbers, the picture looks even better for us and this is actually the fastest growing market right now, not gTLDs.
3) Finally, we take one reference point of Go-Daddy in this release. Take the current Top 10 by total existing volume and paste them all up against the same launch data. You’ll be totally shocked at how they’ve all under performed in marketing new name spaces and many of those have data in both launch columns!
Hope that clarifys a little more. Once again we don’t dispute your points and that’s not what our release is trying to highlight here. Seems electing Go-Daddy as our reference point is putting this off-track a little.
Thanks once again for the healthy chat and originating article from Andrew.
Sunil says
when discussing .tel you can’t use the nameserver argument as all domains are technically hosted by the registry.
and no I don’t work for DomainMonster, but am a happy customer with a portfolio of over a thousand domains with them, none of which would list domainmonsters nameserver if you checked 🙂
Michele says
John
Relying on nameserver data is pointless. You need to use the ICANN monthly reports which would include the registrar of record.
Regards
Michele
Adam says
I’m scared of domain monsters. . . don’t they gobble up domains ? 🙂