Let the testing begin…
They haven’t been available for long, but already we’re seeing varying registration fees for Donuts’ domain names.
Domain name registrar GoDaddy is charging lower annual registration fees for some of the latest new top level domain name offered by Donuts — while charging a premium for others.
Pricing for many of the “second round” Donuts domains (e.g. .photography) as well as pre-orders for some of the to-be-released domains (e.g. .tips) are now $24.99. Most of the initial ones were $39.99.
It appears the first seven domains are all priced at $39.99 and up, including $69.99 for .ventures and .holdings. In the second batch of seven, .estate and .camera are $39.99 while the others are $24.99.
Prices at eNom also seem to have come down for some domains. I’m seeing fees of around $21 for “second round” domains .photography and .equipment, but $32 for first round .guru. eNom is also charging more for .holdings and .ventures at $49.99
You should expect lots of fluctuation in registration fees as registrars and registries test price points.
It’s reasonable to assume that customers will pay more for .holdings and .ventures domains since larger companies will be typical buyers. But only testing will tell.
One of the early criticisms of new top level domain names is that they cost 3-4 times as much as most existing domains, such as .com and .net. The pricing for some of the less expensive domains is around twice the cost of .com.
[Editor’s note: the original version of this story implied that GoDaddy had raised its pricing for .holdings and .ventures. Based on Google cache’s of GoDaddy’s site, it appears the pricing has been higher all along.]
GoDaddy isn’t the cheapest, even with the drop in prices. For example, eNom charges $17 for jkl (.) photography (example).
Those of us that lived the days of $100 /2 years at Verisign for .com, aren’t shocked by the prices.
I think price of .ventures and .holdings was always $69.99. No?
Are you using Enom or Enomcentral? I think at enom you are below a reseller and the reseller can also adjust prices.
Also .club is supposed to have a $10 fee.
That’s possible. I didn’t pay too much attention to those, although All the donuts ones I had checked were $40.
The enom prices are just the ones on their site enom.com not logged in.
atm donuts is reserving all verbs and more on the domain
(love.today, sell.today etc etc my.today me.today etc)
and last night, someone bought all city names on .today
this is an amazing project.
love.today is actually a DPML block by some apparent “trademark” holder. The two letter ones are mandated reserved by ICANN.
sry u right with the love (wrong example)
check out those: smile, tech, design, media ..
https://whois.donuts.co
ICANN told us we must reserve these domains in .TODAY: http://www.icann.org/sites/default/files/tlds/today/today-apd-list-08nov13-en.csv. You’ll find geos in there.
We want to offer those domains to registrars now, and we’re confident we’ll be able to in the coming months, but at the moment ICANN has said we cannot.
.TODAY is not alone. Every TLD being launched has its own list of SLDs that ICANN says must be reserved for now.
Regards
Bob, Donuts Inc
Milan
sounds like a huge waste of money
dunno .. maybe somewhere in future everyone will know that u just have to type the name of the city and .today
it will be always the same layout but with all infos of the city u need
sounds nice
Even with the variable testing of pricing points, what’s are the proceeds to Versign for a basic registration anyhow? Does Verisign simply collect a flat rate (what is it exactly?) per registration? Does Versign collect differently if one were to register Versign.Photography versus Verisign.Ventures? Can’t say I’m personally a fan of the new rollouts but they do look interesting (for development) in comparison to the limited supply/demand of .com domains.
I’m still a fan (like many of us) of the usual (com/org then net) but there will be many success stories (as in development of new businesses) but they will far outnumber success stories of investors/collectors buying up new addresses hoping for future domain sales. I just don’t see the logic from an investment standpoint.
Look at .info, .us or .biz today…..
Constructive criticism anyone?
All this fever whipped up by domain bloggers about new gTLds is not present in the media, including local news. My advise? Calm down.
Blog about important stuff.
important for me is, that i have to change 80% of my order list for .today now
i was so happy after the .gallery golive and now i have to fight for new ideas
as i told .. even every city gone and all the most used words as well
Can you say clu$$f@@k. I was going to reg one at around $40 and it wouldn’t load it into the cart. It said it was available for general registration and then when I checked back rate went up to over $200??? nasty business that dunut group……. or should i say do-not group….
Godaddy did one further, it took pre-reservations, then didn’t fill them, when others at Godaddy got the names, they pulled them from the hand register accounts, and reassigned them to the reservations they sold.
Nasty business, but these companies are enjoying some serious margins, wait for the renewal cluster f#!,
These guys wanted to make domains available to the public who couldn’t get a .com in their desired keyword, but what does a single letter, or keyword, change the renewal, and registration price by $xxx figures?
Why hold back strong keywords, ie) Many geo locations in .today are reserved by the registry. If donuts truly meant what they said, they would have released everything to GA, or their tiered premium drop system.
I can see the slowing of reg’s as more come across, we are 14 deep into about 1200 people. You are looking at the majority of these having less than 5000 registrations. Wait till the drops next year, and all the TM cases that will soon be pending.
http://who.is/whois/zauber.land
This name is reserved by the Registry in accordance with ICANN Policy.
maybe someone can help me and knows whats going on there
Donuts’ registry fees are different across its TLDs, remember.
Yes, I imagine it would be more fair to say that the registries are trying different pricing.
I can imagine seeing real business owners putting whatever.whatever on their signs and people looking at them with a dazed look on their face. For 20+ years consumers have seen names with .com, .net, org. cctlds on the end. There may be some adoption over time but for now business’s may have to put more text next to the domain name explaining that it is actually a domain name and you are supposed to type it in that way without the .com etc. behind the what.what.com, or what.what.net etc..
Pump and Dump………
Whether you can imagine it or not, it will happen. Can’t put the smoke back in the cigar.
One thing seems obvious, registration behavior in 2014 won’t resemble registration behavior in 2015.
We’ll see a spike — maybe just a baby spike — in registrations immediately after each launch, followed by a sudden dropoff and slow exponential decay in the reg rate throughout the next 12 months. The reg rate will be further suppressed as attention is directed toward the land-rush periods of hundreds of other extensions, parading by in single file.
For the average new extension, these spikes will be little blips followed by silence. But the bloggers and registrars will emphasize the blips because they’re “what’s happening” at the moment, intentionally or unintentionally creating the illusion of a prolonged feeding frenzy.
Then comes year 2. The “feeding frenzy” atmosphere sustained by PR campaigns during the rollout and bloggers jumping aboard the bandwagon will have mostly died down. As the dust settles, domainers will look around to figure out which extensions are surviving.
Some extensions will see some consumer adoption, yet those consumers may not show up as the end-user buyers domain investors hope for. So only a fraction of successful extensions will prove to be good investments for flipping purposes. And many of the vanity extensions won’t even be able to point to initial consumer adoption.
Later on, domainers will look at their portfolios and be faced with tough choices. Should they drop anywhere from 3 to 10 to 80 different domains in .com / .net / .org just to keep 1 domain in .plumbing or .ventures (perhaps with those premium $250 per year rates)? Most domainers will be dropping vanity extensions preferentially. It just makes more sense to keep multiple lottery tickets in .COM rather than hold onto 1 lottery ticket in .holdings.
Oh, well …
That’s why you need a strategy to begin with. Domain investing in general, but particularly with the gTLDs is not for the flipping crowd.
A lot of people flip .com’s. A lot hold them and sell 2% a year.
I agree, though, new TLDs probably aren’t good for flippers.
Oddly, I’d disagree. When it comes to domainers and the new extensions, I think most money will be made through short-term flips. There will be lots of flips in year 1, while business owners are scared of unknowns. Domainers will be trying very hard to get rid of their inventory before the renewal fee comes around.
Long term, that’s where dilution becomes apparent. Long term, that’s when domainers begin bidding each other downward by undercutting each others’ asking prices. Long term, that’s when business owners become accustomed to an endless barrage of sales promotions on an endless parade of new extensions. Long term, the fear evaporates and only real end users are left.
Long term, we’re looking at the small number of startup brands that launch each year … then removing the 98% who have always elected to hand-register cheap domains rather than buying premium domains from domainers … and then dividing that remnant sliver by the whole multitude of extensions available. Even that number will be skewed strongly toward .COM, leaving a smaller group of potential buyers for the vanity extensions to fight over like puppies squabbling for a scrap of meat.
For domainers, long-term investments look pretty bleak. Flippers will do better. Most investors will see most gains — such as they are — early on.
there are few good ones already registered
i believe these domains will worth alot in near future
few examples are
money.guru
seo.guru
shop.camera
and few other domains with .estate and directory extension
example
california.estate and california.directory ……