In light of Uniregistry’s price hike, I decided to get a better view into one of its low-volume TLDs.
.Guitars, for example, will see its retail price quintuple from about $20-$30 to $100 or more.
Uniregistry founder Frank Schilling says the price increase is necessary to make strings like .guitars profitable.
Indeed, .guitars is a very small TLD. There were just 1,546 names in the zone file when I downloaded it earlier this week. (nTLD stats says there are 1,851 registrations.)
Even if the wholesale price is $15, .guitars barely covers the $25,000 annual ICANN fees for the name.
I wanted to get a better understanding of the .guitars zone and the type of registrants using it to see what impact the price change will have. So I dug in, bigly. Over the past 24 hours, I nearly 1,000 .guitars domains by hand to see how they are being used.
Of the 1,546 names in the zone, 117 were registered by the registry. A further 13 resolved to expiration pages. I’m sure more are in various phases of expiration, but I decided to remove only the 13 that resolved to an expiration page or had expiration name servers.
That left 1,416 names…
End Users
Of these 1,416 names, I was able to determine that at least 393 of them belong to end users. By end users, I mean a company or person that has a logical connection to .guitars. This includes guitar companies, guitar teachers, sheet music companies, musicians, etc.
140 of these resolved to a valid website on .guitars. I can’t be certain that these aren’t copies of existing sites on other TLDs, but I checked most of them to make sure they weren’t framing another site.
Another 157 are forwarded to a website on another TLD. The remaining 96 either don’t resolve or resolve to a registrar holding page.
There are likely more end users that have registered .guitars domain names that I wasn’t able to identify. However, none of their domains resolved or forwarded to a working website other than a registrar holding page. To be clear, the total number of resolving websites hosted on .guitars was 140.
Add these sites to the forwards and you have about 300 “active” .guitar domains.
Predictably, the are dozens of guitar manufacturers and stores with .guitars websites, such as Rocha.guitars (left) and Jacaranda.guitars (right):
But the majority of sites I saw were independent musicians, guitar teachers, independent instrument stores and other hobbyists. Examples include Dartmouth.guitars (left) and Parlor.guitars (right):
Defensive Registrations
Many of the end user purchases that are forwarded or don’t resolve are probably defensive purchases. But there’s another category of defensive registrations to consider: brands that have nothing to do with guitars or music.
I count at least 101 domains in this category, such as TDameritrade.guitars and Twitter.guitars. There are certainly more, but some of the other brands are smaller and unfamiliar to me.
Domain Investors
At least 216 domains are owned as investments. I counted any domain that resolves to a parking or aftermarket nameserver (e.g. sedoparking.com, uniregistrymarket.net) as well as ones that resolve to a page saying the domain was for sale as domain investor-owned. This doesn’t include registrar holding pages.
The other half
There were 706 domains I couldn’t categorize by owner type. Many of these seem to be small-time speculators that registered a few .guitars domains and didn’t park them with a typical domain parking company. Others may be end users that haven’t done anything with their domains and whose names were not obvious to me.
But none of these 706 domain names are used.
How many will survive the price hike?
How many of these domain name owners will pay $100 a year for their .guitar domains?
That’s a tough question that we won’t get the answer to for another year or two.
I imagine many of the domain investors will drop their domains or only hold on to a select few.
Some of the 140 domains owned by end users that have an actual website probably won’t pay the added fee. Others will.
Then you have the end user domains that don’t resolve or are forwarded. How many of these will be renewed? Will some people not notice the increased price until after the domains have been renewed?
Another wildcard: Uniregistry founder Frank Schilling has said he might apply discounts to the new prices, so it’s possible that the renewal prices will be much lower than $100, at least for the next year or two.
The economics
Uniregistry only needs 1/5th of the existing registrants to stay on board for its price increase to make financial sense if all of them pay the new price. It’s betting on more sticking around, and it’s probably a good bet. Some of these large brand holders won’t blink an eye at the price increase.
A lot of premium inventory will now be opened up at $100, too, so this might stoke some demand of domains that previously had very high prices.
To understand the economics, take a look at Uniregistry’s .game and compare it to .games.
.Game only has about 2,500 names. Rightside’s .Games has over 10,000. Yet .game costs 10x-20x more than .games.
Who is making more money?
I own a .guitar, and nobody has sent us any notification of a price increase?
Is there any central place we can find out what domains, are effected, and by how much, you would think this would be accessible, or shareable info by the parties involved.
There’s no requirement I know of that registrars inform registrants, but I imagine they will do it a couple months before it happens.
FYI, the standard wholesale price of .guitar is going from $20 to $100.
It will be interesting to see if the resellers/hosters are informed as well. With website development and domain registrations being outsourced, the resellers and web developers are the ones who may also be an important link in the chain of communications. The registrars are going to take the main hit but the Uniregistry gTLDs are small and compared to the ordinary registration volume of most registrars, this might go unnoticed on a global scale. Uniregistry should have made allowances for any developed website and kept the renewal fee stable for those registrants. It really cannot afford to lose developed websites from its gTLDs as they are the only thing that drives awareness. If people don’t see a gTLD being used, then the gTLD may as well not exist.
onlinedomain.com/2017/03/09/domain-name-news/real-percentages-upcoming-uniregistry-domain-extension
The following extensions are affected with approx new price set for September…
.hosting ($300)
.Hugo’s ($300)
.audio ($100)
.black Friday ($100)
.diet ($100)
.flowers ($100)
.hiphop ($100)
.guitars ($100)
.property ($100)
.Christmas (under $100)
.help (under $100)
.sex (under $100)
.tattoo (under $100)
.click (increase by $1)
.link (increase by $1)
…where to find out this stuff, as the extension operators are not required to inform registrants, you have to keep an eye on blogs such as this.
The only requirement is a 6 month delay in implementation.
There is no limit to price increasing
The only potential bonuses…
Registration and renewal discounts have been mentioned, though these will be below the new prices, chances are they will be higher than the current price model…
You can register your current domain out to 10 years to buy time at the current price, but have to consider the cost of changing domains down the track should you not be happy with the new price or worse case scenario, uniregistry decides to increase prices again.
There is no guarantee that any renewal discounts offered will continue, discounts offered may get smaller over time.
Premium prices might drop to match the new prices.
Will someone already paying a premium benefit or if their premium price will remain, I suspect the later.
I suspect that prices may drop back again in a few years, but anyone willing to pay the higher prices will be locked in.
It is possible that before such happens, there could be a further price increase.
Some names may be worthwhile even with the threat of the price hike, but the bigger question will be whether the extension/s are poisoned in the process.
If they get a bad reputation, then real world usage will drop.
Think long and hard on how you feel about this and whether you can afford a potential jump to $300 (or more)
In the .guitar extension, if uniregistry looses 4 out of 5 registrations they will be no worse off.
Once they lock in people at the higher price, they can choose to drop prices back and domains dropped may be re-registered by others so unnecessary will be better off in the end.
The drawback though is they could keep doing it
I will probably keep one domain, register it out to 10 years (currently registered for about 5) and drop the other 11 domains I have
Ron, you missed the ‘s’ off the end of the extension. It’s .guitars, not .guitar. If an owner doesn’t know the correct extension that should tell you all you need to know about the public’s confusion over new gTLDs.
@Ron says
“I own a .guitar, and nobody has sent us any notification of a price increase?”
The reason nobody has sent you any notification of a price increase is that .guitar doesn’t exist.
Solid analysis Andrew.
Even if the financial math makes sense to a registry (that jacks up the pricing) it is a horrible experience for the end user customer (registrant). Remember them? Forgetting about the registrant POV (or minimizing it) is sadly par for the course with some of the new TLD registries and a major black eye for our industry. It’s all very sad but not surprising if you’ve been watching the numbers.
I trust Donuts after experiencing their price increase (grandfathering prices even though you miss out on lowering of prices because it creates stability, a knowledge of what to expect in future)
Uniregistry has declared instability
I do not like instability
Andrew, this is a great analysis, you can see why Frank’s claim that “I am sure that every other registry will eventually copy the higher price model or be bought by one that does.”, will likely come to pass.
Andrew, kudos on the research. That was no small undertaking. Very interesting statistics from that.
I guess this reaffirms the term PIONEERS GET SLAUGHTERED
If as stated above others go down this line, and for the most part, after X many years the working in their contracts allows them to do this most are dead in the water.
Just the thought, and process of this, is enough to sink the market which is on life support already.
I was so so about gtld’s they seemed interesting, but now this feels like .biz .mobi .us all over again.
.US still has the potential of the sleeping giant that it is. It’s in a completely different category.
Okay, so Frank posted before that high pricing works. But it may only work for some TLDs to simply stay above water vs. underwater. Big whoop.
Here’s what it fails to do:
Help new TLDs catch on to compete with .com and become popular. If high pricing scares off most people so that a TLD merely stays above water, so what? 2,500 is not exactly a lot, even if every single one of them has a developed website.
.Com laughs at this.
I think Ntld registries are abandoning the “ntlds will soon be everywhere” mantra and looking more at “how can we build a viable business”.
Pinpointed Research!
Why would any independent musician or guitar teacher want a .guitars (plural) domain name? They can only play a single guitar at any time.
Surely they would prefer .guitar (singular). Now there’s an idea for a new tld in the second round of new tld launches that is coming.
Also, what about .cello as a new tld. There must be many people who play a cello. Why stop there. There is also .accordion, .zither, .harpsichord – the list is endless.
I see a second failed goldrush starting. Offer them initially for a sucker-inducing one dollar first year registration and once reeled in raise the renewal fee to 300 dollars or more, because as we have just discovered with Frank Schilling’s price hikes, with these new tlds there are no restrictions on price increases for new tld renewals. This is despite some other new tld operators saying that they have no “IMMEDIATE” plans to raise renewal prices.
The sky’s the limit as to how much captured existing new tld users can be milked.
Left unchecked, a registry’s relationship with domain owners can become callous and exploitative. Apart from Uniregistry, this is a terrible failure on the part of ICANN, which failed to adequately regulate the nTLD program in terms of price hikes.
Whenever someone invests in a domain name – whether as a domainer or an end user – they’re reluctant to relocate. Too much brand recognition tied up with past marketing and preexisting customers.
What landlord would raise the rent by a factor of 5? And without notifying tenants well in advance! Domainers who believed in Uniregistry and its nTLDs will mostly lose whatever they paid the company. End users will face either an inconvenient rebrand or a quintupled expense.
This isn’t even new. ICM Registry effectively did much the same thing a few years ago with .XXX / .SEX / .PORN / .ADULT.
If ICANN were properly conerned with registrant rights, they would prevent this by regulating what registries can get away with. But, like so many industries, the regulators have been financially captured by the companies they’re meant to regulate. Registries pay and lobby ICANN – not registrants. So ICANN allows registries to run roughshod over registrants. Hardly surprising.