Good luck finding a new .art domain at “regular” registration prices.
The .art domain name, which will enter general availability on May 10, will have a staggering 3.5 million domain names that will be available for registration at prices higher than standard.
Standard retail prices should be about $15-$20. The premium domain names will start at under $100 retail for the first year, with the majority under $1,000. Premium renewals will be under $50 at many registrars.
John Matson, who is on the Strategic Planning Board for .Art, told Domain Name Wire that the premium domain names were selected based on big data analysis. The analysis considered a number of factors, including the linguistic relevance to art. The company states:
The .ART Registry undertook a substantial big data effort to analyze over 250 massive databases comprising over 6 billion words and identified 3,500,000 word forms that have measureable domain name value. Linguistic scientists were retained to develop algorithms that determine the relative strength of a word form related to art. In addition, several other attributes of the word forms were measured such as: Internet search popularity, length of characters, number of occurrences of the word form in other domain zones, prior selling prices, current asking prices, consumer rating values and art industry indexes. These hundreds of millions of data points were combined into an algorithm that provides an individual value for each of the 3,500,000 word forms. This approach to domain pricing allows the .ART registry to price standard names at an affordable level and charge a higher or premium price for meaningful word forms. We believe that anyone will be able to find their preferred word form at a fair price. If tir preferred word form is a highly sought after art related term, it will be priced higher than standard, but at a fair price set supported by rigorous big data analysis.
This sounds similar to what other registries did, most notably Rightside, but they also drew the line somewhere.
To put the 3.5 million number in perspective, consider that the only new top level domain names with over one million registrations have achieved this by offering domains for less than a dollar. Furthermore, all but a few of the TLDs with greater than 100,000 registrations had similar promotions that account for the bulk of their registrations.
Matson said that the approach was created to let people get the domain they want at reasonable prices. If the domain name they want has a premium, they can find a domain name they want that’s similar to it at standard registration prices.
But at what point is every domain name that has value a premium domain name?
I would struggle to find 10,000 domain names on any of the non-generic new strings that I would consider worth registering at standard prices.
.Biz, which has been out for over 15 years, has only two million registered. .Info has more thanks, in part, to heavy discounting.
Are there more than 10,000 names on .art that people will find worth registering? Sure. But just because they are worth registering doesn’t mean they are worth a premium.
One mistake I’ve seen some registries make is that they’ve decided that any second level string that could have any value under the top level domain name should be premium. The problem is that some of these domains might be relevant, but will only be registered at standard pricing.
.Art opened a priority period for people in the art industry in February, but then promptly halted registrations due to a technical reason. Based on the volume of registrations to date and what I heard from people who tried to register domains, the technical issue may have been that people were able to register premium domain names at lower prices.
Hmm, let’s see.
Depending on your source/definition, there are between 400k and 700k unique English words. Let’s assume it’s the upper range of 700k. Let’s price every English word!
Maybe they’re going after the CHIPs as well – there are about 300k LLLL combinations that are not words – let’s toss those in too! That puts us at 1MM.
Art is the same word in Spanish and French , so I guess we could translate every English word into their foreign equivalents. Another 1.4MM, that gets us to 2.4MM…
What else?
I’d be willing to bet they made a fundamental error and didn’t properly disambiguate the word ‘art’ from the many other words it is part of – cart, mart, dart, fart, etc, and they drastically overestimated the relevance of a lot of words that have little to nothing to do with art, which made it into the final price list. Big data rarely means smart data.
That, or they priced a LOT of 2-3 word combinations – austingallery.art, thebestfine.art, etc.
Guess we’ll see how well it works for them after May.10th, but I’d be surprised to see the zone file break 5,000 units in the first year
Looks like 3 character, a lot of 4 character strings and yes, they included multiple word strings as well which is the only way to hit 3.5 million
nice short extension, but holding back 3.5 million domains combined with 99.999999% of artist are starving will result in another BIG FAIL.
People will just never learn….
Nice short relevant extension.
Lots of competing extensions that are art related, many more that aren’t art related but can be easily used.
.ART has only one outstanding factor, the quality of the early adopters.
That quality may drop dramatically once general opens.
We shall see.
Wow, all these new gTLD operators are really dumb. I guess most of us knew that these extensions would fail – it’s basic high school economics – so it’s no surprise that this one will be yet another wacky business model.
It’s crash and burn time.
Not a great extension anyway but they have come in right when things are falling apart with a very poor offering.
Just plain idiotic and VERY stupid. They need to look up the word SUFFOCATION! They are 100% clueless about business, numbers, sales, and a list of 10 more. So far EVERY grand prediction for gtld’s has failed miserably. I would take F.art lol Cuz that is all this is one big F.ART!
Pardon me, but does anyone know if they have any Grey Poupon?
Why only 3.5 million Premium?
Why not 100 million Premium?
Or, even cooler, why not a Billion Premium .ART domains?
LOL
JUNK.ART
The TLD is short and good, however I am afraid it will fail, as they’re not learning from mistakes other TLDs have done. Just a matter of time, before they will change their premium domain strategy … as soon as they do not get the results they expect.
After an initial rocky st.art from the .ART Registry suffering from technical difficulties with Premium domain names being available to register at the base PAP price + Application Fee (although not officially confirmed), they appear to be steering .ART in the right direction after a rest.art.
As an end user (with 5 .ART names for my needs) with the conviction to follow my head and he.art, I like the reduction in base costs during Preferred Access from ~$240+VAT to an anticipated ~$100+VAT during General Availability with annual renewals falling to a much lower confirmed rate. It’s enough to deter Domainers from flooding the market, parking domain names for years creating a barrier to entry for many bona fide art professionals with increased ten-fold plus pricing. In response to Rick, there’s your suffocation where content needs to be given time and space to breathe. To equally being affordable for end users to develop content or migrate and add real value to the namespace through word of mouth and commercial sales of creative product. You would be lucky to order a couple of 4’x4′ blank canvases for $100, let alone acquire a short meaningful name for your business – it’s a relatively minor cost in respect of the materials and time that artists have to invest in their businesses. It really depends upon your perspective and interest in .ART as to how you will perceive their pricing model. It will dot suck for some and be about right for the remainder.
Contrary to Drew’s belief and having been privy to browsing the trends in the .ART zone file where fellow artists have been registering their own trading names or trying to outsm.art each other with generics, I’ll be very surprised if .ART don’t easily surpass 5,000 registrations in the first year. I appreciate there’s some redundant “test” names in the .ART zone file but .ART hasn’t even reached General Availability yet but already aiming to hit that number without public investment and without all major registrars on board yet. I’ll see you in a year’s time to look at the number.
The Early Adoption phase illustrates how relevant and established home brands have embraced the advent of .ART with some big names already partnered up, where many other new registries aren’t actively pursuing those relationships and that’s one of many aspects that sets the extension ap.art.
Most of us are accustom to paying $10/year or thereabouts for a dot com renewal, that we cry foul when prices are higher elsewhere. None of us like to pay higher but I would say the pricing for “entry” into the .ART namespace is about right, dropping to a perceived normal rate for renewals.
Drew’s predictions were way off and mine were spot on. .ART smashing those 5,000 registrations by the end of the first day of General Availability, grossing $750,000 and there’s still 364 days of the year left…
Tweet | News from .ART
“During the first 24 hours, over 3’000 domain names were purchased. Of those about 95% were standard, e.g., personal names of people and organizations, while the rest belonged to the .ART inventory of word and word combinations. While the personal names are mostly sold at standard prices, starting from $15, the .ART inventory names are valued individually by a proprietary mathematical “big data” algorithm. This totaled over $150’000 amount of sales in first 24 hours.
.ART closed its Preferred Access Period with over 300 live sites. The starting price has been $300 and there were about 2500 registrations for a total retail volume of sales over $600’000. Nearly half of these were from the .ART inventory. Among them, .ART has also gifted approximately 500 domain names to art school students and not-for-profit cultural institutions.”
Whose predictions are you referring to?
Hi Andrew,
Many thanks for the article and keeping others informed of domain industry news even though many of us are passive readers.
I was referring to Drew’s opening comment above and perhaps should have replied directly to him.
“Guess we’ll see how well it works for them after May.10th, but I’d be surprised to see the zone file break 5,000 units in the first year”
All the best,
Derrick
Ahh, got it. Thanks
Hi Andrew:
Your post suggests that .ART’s 3.5 million “premium names” will prevent the users from finding the names they want for reasonable prices (“good luck finding a new .art domain at ‘regular’ registration prices”). But there is no contradiction between .ART having this number of premium names and users finding affordable .ART names.
To date, the bulk of .ART registrations have been by individuals and companies in art-related or creative activities buying their own personal identities – firstnamelastname.art and companyname.art – generally available at standard prices. We were gratified by the comment of Derrick Austin who has supported our enterprise in word and action.
(Generally, the .ART team is very happy that the bulk of the registrations in our zone come from real people and institutions aiming to establish their active presence in the zone. From its inception, .ART has aimed at developing an active, live ecosystem for creative users.)
As we migrate from the .ART Preferred Access Periods (retail ~$300) to GA (retail ~$20), registrations will become even more affordable than before.
The premium names innovation at .ART is a highly analytical, in-depth approach that provides predictive values for domains.
.ART has looked at names, i.e., words and coupled words, as an inventory to be sorted, categorised, priced and shelved individually, just as the products in any shop. It is not expected to sell the entire inventory; it is intended to appropriately value it.
Stated another way, domain values are more like grocery store inventory, rather than the $1 store. (Maybe we should start to migrate from the term “premium names” to something more meaningful as the domain name industry evolves.)
The recent publication, Hidden Advantages of a Relevant Domain Name, indicates the impact domain choice can have on organic search engine results, which in turn affects the domain value. (See, http://thedna.org/resources/seostudy/.)
That does not mean that the non-standard names are not priced unreasonably. Most of them are priced within $100-300.
As postulated by Paul Stahura and demonstrated by this predictive value algorithm, the vast share of value in “premiums” is not in the super-valued names but rather in the “long tail” of names that are valued higher, but not too much higher, than standard-priced names.
The response from registrars to .ART has been generally positive. .ART has signed agreements with registrars around the world who have recognized the value of the .ART name inventory. Everyone can find an affordable name for themselves on .ART and .ART will continue to do everything possible to create a lively, online ecosystem for art and creativity.
I am pleased to be writing on behalf of the .ART registry and would welcome additional discussion on the future of the domain name industry and this topic.
Kurt the definition of premium: “relating to or denoting a commodity or product of superior quality and therefore a higher price.”
When more .art names are considered premium then are in the english language then the term premium loses its meaning.
I would like to buy stohn.art since my brand is “Stohn”, however I am not paying $312 for stohn.art, I would gladly pay $18.99 a year for it.
$312… consider yourself lucky. Mine is over $1000. I’ve been waiting a long time for the .art to become available to the public and to now find out my domain is “premium” is a joke. I’m in shock.
Why not give the Registry or Registrar a call? I phoned Instra (store.art) the other week from the UK to USA to discuss whether there was “wiggle room” on the asking price of a premium I was interested in in terms of a discounted price. Of course there was.
I would pay $312 for my last name but it’s one of those that’s reserved, so at least you have that option and it’s basically the same price as the flat rate during Preferred Access.
.art is pretty stupid to premium price so many names to those in a general community who arent known to be the most flush with cash group of people – artists. They just committed suicide.
Also, please get rid of the exit-intent popup – its a highly annoying and bad trend going on with the web these days.
.ART registration management is terrible, first you have no way to tell via API if a domain is premium or not, then, the price offered via API is 30% higher than what you can see directly on their site…
We are strongly advising all our clients to stay away from this extension, keep their money to buy a .com or country tld and use the extra money to buy some ads…
I like it but I won’t use it for my website …… Just direct to another domain