Customer losses still fairly low after switch to new system.
Last month I reported that Moniker only lost 17,506 .com domain names to transfers in June after its disastrous switch to a new registrar platform. I predicted that the number would shoot up in July, since it was easier to transfer domains out at that point. (Official .com registry reports are published three months after the end of the month).
The July report is out, and Moniker’s losses in July were essentially the same as June. The register lost just 18,057 domains to transfers.
This is certainly more than before the Moniker system change, but not substantially. In January-May this year, it lost about 6,000-14,000 domains to transfers each month.
After you consider new registrations, transfers-in and deletions, Moniker’s .com based dropped by about 24,000 to 1.035 million domain names.
I suspect a higher number of domains were transferred out in August, but I suppose I shouldn’t bet on it at this point. It seems that many customers are willing to stick with the registrar, at least until their domains come up for renewal.
I’m still in transfer mode with them Andrew, I have about 2k domains left there and as they are coming up for renewal, I get out of there and never look back.
I guess a lot of people do wait until they’re do for renewal, so it might be a slow bleed.
I’m not surprise this will happen. 🙁
I have to wonder if the domains caught by snapnames in the past are counted as moniker numbers now or not. Since in whois they are listed as being with web.com, yet only controllable via the moniker panel it makes it a bit confusing. I had less than 500 domains with moniker but the majority of them were caught by snapnames so became web.com names.
300 down, 500 more to go, Thanks, for nothing Bonnie
It is very old data though. I think you’ll probably find they’ve lost several hundred thousand names since, especially after the thefts.
Didn’t Elequa alone transfer out 100k names?
I think you’re right, I’m just surprised to not see if happen in July.
I think generally people won’t pay renewals early unless they absolutely need to. All the issues around the new design were enough to get people moving, but not enough to cause a “bank run”. Once lots of names get stolen though, that is the catalyst to get out of there.
There will still be lots of low/no value names though that just get transferred when the renewal comes due. If Moniker is at 1million names, I suspect they will lose 30%+ of their business. They probably wiped out half the value in it, because they’ll get very low growth as well. the customer base will have to change to people who don’t know about their history.