Domain registrar goes all in on domain name investors with revamped platform.
About a decade after it lost much of its domain investor customer base in a disastrous platform switch, domain registrar Moniker is going all in on domain name investors again.
This week, the domain registrar launched a new platform with domain investors in mind, rather than the end-user-focused platform it has used in recent years.
“Everything developed on this platform in the future will be built with domain investors in mind,” Marc McCutcheon of Moniker’s parent company, Team Internet Group, told Domain Name Wire.
The new platform is based on Internet.bs, another registrar owned by Team Internet Group that is popular with domain investors.
All of the bulk tools domain investors demand are there, with a couple of additional features that might differentiate the registrar.
One of these is called Treasury, which is designed to help domain investors protect their most valuable domains. Domains using the Treasury feature have additional security features including a second two-factor request in order to make certain changes to them. The company plans to expand Treasury features in the future.
Another interesting feature is the ability to add and track domains registered elsewhere. This allows domain investors to track all their domains in one place and even get renewal alerts. Investors can also add external domains to Moniker DNS and manage them from within their Moniker account.
Moniker will support Afternic and Sedo, although this will not be fully implemented until all existing Moniker customers have migrated to the new platform over the next month or two.
McCutcheon said he also wants to support up-and-coming aftermarket platforms.
To court domain investors, Moniker offers pricing tiers with discount levels at 100 and 500 total domains in the account. The discounts are a fixed 8% and 16%, respectively, on list prices. This somewhat crude discounting (as opposed to different discounts based on TLD) is a bit limiting, leaving the best public .com price slightly higher than some other domain investor-focused registrars. However, I suspect that larger customers can discuss further discounts with Moniker.
McCutcheon will be at NamesCon in Austin next week, showing off the new platform on stage and meeting with domain investors.
Monte cahn is the man the goat the legend
I use to have all my domains there before their Key-Systems horrible switch. Gonna be hard getting people back when many are happy with their registrars
Lot of hate going on with GD right now. Easy sell to some if you’re discounts are good and you have a good team of customer service people.
Not buying it barely got names out of there
Move 1/4 of my domains there under Montey’s tenure. After the buyout things went south. I renewed a name with a cc. Don’t ask what happened, but the payment was never processed, although I received a payment confirmation. Fast forward 3 months the name dropped, and went to a namejet auction without me EVER getting any sort of expiration email, etc…… My fault for not keeping tabs on nameservers, but NEVER going back. Had multiple Sedo offers on the name for $5k+. I call it registerfly 2.0.
While I’ve culled my number of domains way down from the peak due to PPC going into the toilet years back, I’ve kept about half my collection with Moniker for many years. We all make mistakes (please raise your hand if you never have), and their service and people are top notch. This new platform is a winner, and I encourage my fellow domainers who left in years past to give them another try. Their slightly higher prices are well worth all that they provide.