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Donuts to increase domain prices in October

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Most of Donuts’ domains will be more costly soon.

Domain name registry Donuts is raising prices October 1.

On average, prices for standard domain registrations will increase 7%. Premium domain prices will remain unchanged.

Of Donuts’ 241 top level domains, 16 will remain unchanged and 220 will increase by 6% to 9%.

One domain name will be reduced. .Group’s wholesale price will be slashed 35% to compete with similar domain names in the market.

Customers can renew their domain names before October 1 for up to 10 years at today’s prices.

In practice, first-year registrants likely won’t notice the increase because Donuts heavily discounts first-year registrations.

New TLDs, five years in

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Picture of birthday cake with five candles

 

It was five years ago this month that the first domains under the new top level domain (nTLD) program started rolling out to consumers. The first Latin script general availability domains came out in early February 2014.

Remember .guru? .Plumbing? Yeah, that was a long time ago.

Here’s how I’d sum up the first five years of new top level domains.

Demand and artificial demand

Registration numbers for new TLDs have not met expectations for just about anyone who put money into it. That includes the many registries that spent millions acquiring strings as well as ICANN.

I thought new TLD applicants were very bullish, but even I was surprised when the first sunrises got only a couple hundred registrations.

Applicants should have understood the market size better. People were looking at registrations in .com and predicting market size for new TLD strings but many applicants expected some magic demand to come out of nowhere. The reality is that there are only so many people creating a website at a given time. They’re going to look for a .com or ccTLD name. If they don’t get that then they might consider a new TLD. So new TLD demand for people creating websites is a subset of total site creator demand. Without a catalyst for more people to create websites, demand won’t shoot up. Click here to continue reading…

A prediction: new TLD registrations will drop in 2019

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A drop in total registrations will be a healthy sign of a maturing market.

A drop in new top level domain registration numbers would be a health thing.

This week I published my annual predictions podcast episode featuring 19 predictions for 2019.

Here’s another prediction for 2019: the number of registered domain names in new top level domains will decrease. But this is actually a good thing, as I’ll explain.

The reason for the anticipated drop is a shift in business model at Famous Four Media, which is now Global Registry Services Limited, aka GRS Domains.

The domains under management in this portfolio were built on very cheap (sometimes free) domain registrations. That’s why .loan is the third (or second depending on who you ask) biggest top level domain in terms of volume. nTLDstats shows 2.2 million .loan domain names.

John McCormac, who runs HosterStats.com, has been tracking .loan and other former Famous Four Media domains and says renewal rates for these domains are dismally low when renewal prices are higher. He calculates that renewal rates for 2017 registrations was under 1% through the first three quarters of 2018. So over 99% of those domains dropped.

Historically, these would be replaced by people registering new domains. But GRS Domains started charging higher prices toward the end of last year. Retail prices for .loan domains are now $10+. Here are HosterStat’s new registration calculations for .loan through the first day of each month: Click here to continue reading…

Registry websites for former FFM top level domains are all down

by — Services 5 Comments

Registry sites with contact information have gone dark.

[Update: I heard back from the court-appointed administrator. The problem has been fixed.]

The registry websites for top level domain names that were formerly owned by Famous Four Media are all down.

Famous Four Media’s domains are now part of a portfolio owned by Global Registry Services (GRS) Ltd after some sort of investor revolt, as outlined at Domain Incite. GRS is being managed by a court-appointed administrator who works at PricewaterhouseCoopers.

With a low-price strategy, these domains have over 4 million domains second level domains. .Loan has 2.2 million domains in the zone file. Other top domains include .win, .men and .stream.

But for about the past week, DNW readers report they have been unable to visit any of the nic.TLD sites such as nic.loan. These sites include abuse contacts for the domains.

I have reached out to the court-appointed administrator for comment.

What new TLD registrar data can tell you about the health of a namespace

by — Domain Registrars 4 Comments

Which registrars are top for a domain can help explain TLD growth.

It can be difficult to judge the success of a top level domain based on the number of registrations. Unfortunately, that’s all we usually have. But digging down just one level can give a hint about the quality of a namespace’s registrations.

Take a look at the #10 domain on nTLDstat’s charts: .LTD.

It appears that this domain is doing quite well with about 500,000 names in the zone file. But take a look at the breakdown by registrar and things look fishy.

Alibaba is #1 with 93% of the market. West.cn is #2 with another 3% of the market. So over 95% of registrations are at Chinese domain name registrars.

The “Limited” corporate identifier comes from the UK but also extends to former colonies. Think Hong Kong. And there’s a corporate identifier in China that translates to Limited.

But over 93% of registrations coming through one Chinese registrar? Such a big skew to one Chinese registrar is perplexing.

It’s also strange when you see sudden jumps in registrations outside of the launch phases:

This suggests that much of the activity is based on promotions and bulk registrations rather than people registering the domains to use for their business.

Compare this to Google’s .app and its 300k+ registrations. The #1 registrar is GoDaddy, which is a good sign because GoDaddy is by far the largest registrar in the world. #2 is Google, which makes sense given that it’s Google’s TLD. Then you have Namecheap, West263 and Name.com. Seems reasonable.

Are many of these registrations from investors? Sure, but these are also likely spread out across many domain investors. I also like how smooth this registration curve is:

This isn’t to say that there’s a problem with the business model of targeting Chinese domain investors. At the same time, it’s worth looking at the registrar data and trend lines to understand more about how a TLD is growing.