Company forecasts only 4 of its new TLD strings having over 50,000 DUM after three years.
For the most part, new top level domain applicants have remained quiet about their registration projections.
There’s a good reason for this, especially if they’re in a contention set with other applicants. If competitors know how many domains they expect to register, they can back into how much the other company might pay in an auction.
But Afilias is an exception to this lack of disclosure. All but one of its 26 applications include a forecast for the number of domains under management (DUM) after three years. They also include some sort of justification, and sometimes use qualifiers such as noting that the forecast is conservative.
Here are the company’s DUM forecasts for each of its applications:
.app not disclosed
.info (Chinese IDN) 5,000
.mobi (Chinese IDN) 5,000
.lotto 5,000
.casino 5,000
.red 5,000
.organic 8,000
.health 14,000
.pet 25,000
.pink 14,000
.meet 15,000
.team 20,000
.win 20,000
.black 20,000
.blue 20,000
.kim 20,000
.lgbt 20,000
.radio 20,000
.inc 20,100
.bet 21,100
.memorial 25,000
.shiksha 25,000
.green 50,100
.llc 50,100
.ltd 50,100
.mls 50,100
These numbers are a lot lower than what I think many applicants are expecting.
Public Interest Registry, the registry for .org, has a goal of 1 million .ngo registrations. That would require about 1 in 10 non governmental organizations to register the domain. There’s no timeline to this goal, and it’s possible Afilias has similar long term goals for some of its domains.
(It’s also possible that Afilias sandbagged its forecasts to make competitors think Afilias will bid less at auction than it really will.)
Another comparison is a pitch deck for Domain Venture Partners, which is partnered with applicant Famous Four. It shows a “standard” registry getting hundreds of thousands of registrations after a year. It’s typical for investor pitch decks to include glowing projections, but this is radically different than Afilias’ numbers.
It seems that they are being realistic and conservative, which I like. The $100Million projections by other companies are absurd, at this point.
For .ngo, I always cringe at the the top down type approaches.
“There are 1.3 billion Chinese people… if we get just 1% of them to buy our product…”
That type of modeling leads to insanely high projections.
I like the modeling that estimates the cost to acquire just ONE customer – and then repeating those steps to acquire the next customer. That’s more realistic.
I think a company that assumes they will convert 1 of 10 of ANY target group is way overreaching.
Aron
Andrew if these are the numbers from the ICANN apps most applicants estimated numbers much lower than expected as their three year reserve was based off projected registrations. I’m not saying Afilias did or didn’t do that just that a lot of applicants did.
That makes sense.
Sandbagging: To downplay or misrepresent one’s ability in a game or activity in order to deceive (someone), especially in gambling: sandbagged the pool player by playing poorly in the first game when stakes were low.
Good info, Andrew! Even if Afilias is conservative, it looks like none of their applied gTLDs will reach 1 million registrations in 10 years. So most new gTLDs will be very small players when compared with .com or even .mobi. They are not going to threaten the solid position of .com.
Interesting