Namebio.com restrict (more) free content?

[Domainication]

Did anyone noticed the fact that namebio only shows five search results from now on too?

I guess we will need a membership for (full) results now - which is defenetly worth it but i did not read about a statement at all (social media, etc.) - am i missing something?

 

[podaf]

In return. I think we have also to ask them to pay us if they want us to report our sales in their platform.

 

[lovely4ever]

if someone creat alternative website to namebio with same service and put only $1 a month subscription fees will make a good profitable business , and will kill namebio .

.

 

[alcy]

it's a good tool for newbies so they suffer most from this... rest of us just go there for fun... like np sale thread or McDonald...... cutting numbers like this come on ..its like we is some dumb kindergarten kids getting penalty in the corner... I mean what is u thinking man. i guess the 40 second ads werent make enuff mulAmula huh

 

[kor]

While there were 100 free listings until yesterday, it has now been reduced to 5! Which makes no sense.

If I want to switch to the most affordable package to access 100 listings, it has been reduced from 100 listings to 25! I would say something for that but forum rules don't allow it.

Moreover, for the service I pay for, are you suggesting that I should waste my time sorting and filtering each query to exceed the limits?

This is sheer nonsense in every way!

I wish you success with your egoistic approach @Michael!

I've already switched to alternative sources.

 

[karmaco]

I think the fact that the lowest paid tier doesn’t even match what was free before and that you didn’t make any formal announcement is to just going to have the opposite result of what you want by alienating domainers.

I do understand the need to monetize what you have built but all this sorting talk— most of us don’t have all day to apply repeated sorts to maximize a tiny quota.

People pay for things that are fast, convenient, helpful and priced fairly for what is being given.

This change makes it harder to use and less appealing and more restrictive —which is a shame because it really is a great database you have accumulated.

I don’t think you are going to gain many on that bottom tier by reducing what limits were previously free. Maybe that doesn’t matter because you are focused more on the other tiers it seems.

Realistically the bottom tier should be a priority because more people can afford that one.

If people are abusing the system you should block them not punish everyone else.

 

[mdent]

In return. I think we have also to ask them to pay us if they want us to report our sales in their marketplace.

I was thinking the same thing.

Weird business move, they went way overboard with these changes. I doubt they were losing money with the previous setup

I might look into starting an at-cost alternative for the lulz

 

[Michael]

If you register for free you get 10 results per search instead of 5. I know that still doesn't sound like a lot, but with sorting by date and price, both ascending and descending, you can actually get 40 results per search pretty quickly. And that's before filtering on things like Venue or Date Range, the permutations allow for hundreds of results if you want to put in the time. That's plenty for most casual users and the typical searches they'll be doing. You can still follow the daily results on NameBio Live or the Daily Market Report. We're still running auctions and pending deletes against the database and publishing those lists daily.

NameBio has been going for 16 years as a free service, and it still is free, it's just less free and has a little more friction. It's incredibly difficult to sell advertising in such a small industry, the companies that can afford to pay, well... everyone already knows about them and visits them daily so they don't advertise much. The newer services have no ad budgets. There isn't much middle ground. Go turn off your ad blocker and count the ads on Domaining.com to see how bad it has gotten. We lost half our advertisers this year already.

When I joined NameBio more than 8 years ago I decided not to change the free limits. When I launched paid memberships more than four years ago I actually increased the free limits if you register an account. The memberships were just so we could ship some feature requests that weren't realistic to give away for free to guest users. When we sold NameBio two years ago the buyers left it alone. This is despite all of us knowing that an ad-supported model doesn't make any sense for an extremely niche industry. That's why most services are paid, like DotDB, DomainIQ, Efty, Estibot, etc.

I've really tried to make a go at being primarily ad-supported, but it's time to pivot. Even though each year we serve more than 350,000 unique users, process many millions of searches, and have an average time on site of more than 48 minutes (which if you've ever owned a site you know is off the charts) it is still borderline impossible to attract advertisers. And only a few hundred people have memberships because we gave away such a crazy amount of functionality and data for free trying to attract eyeballs for advertisers. Most of them just really hate ads/captchas or wanted to support the project because we help them make money.

But that's not enough to keep things afloat, much less do all the things we want to do. Like finish our AI appraiser that we started 6 years ago and had to table, or an ML tool to estimate the probability of a retail sale for a given domain at various price points, or reviving our game and making it web-based with more modes, or creating educational content and doing deep-dives into the data for articles. It's not greed, we're just trying to get on solid footing and do more while ad revenue is hard to come by and affiliate revenue is basically gone thanks to Honey. But to do that we need to give away a more reasonable amount for free. Better than the alternative of being 100% paid. I sincerely hope it never comes to that.

Yes, Price Range and Domain Length are disabled for now, but that is unrelated. Those filters are constantly abused to get around limits, and are rarely used legitimately. I'm planning to replace them with presets that will still be usable but not prone to abuse. The same thing happened with the Date Range filter years ago, it used to be a from/to field, but within hours it was abused so insanely heavily that we had to replace it with presets. Hopefully this will be done in the next few weeks, it's high up on my list.

I'm sorry we had to adjust the limits, I know nobody likes getting less of something for free.

 

[RozasMD]

Surviving as a small investor is becoming increasingly difficult, and these kinds of moves make it even harder. Let's make it harder for small investors to get info or resources. But who's your audience? Hey, @Michael, listen to this: our budgets are under heavy stress too.

Honestly, I started thinking about quitting about six months ago and probably should have closed for good three months ago. I'm probably three months away from starting to liquidate inventory massively and keeping only the most valuable 3-5% of my portfolio and not looking back.

Among all of the players you are going to get all of us, small investors, out of the game. Which Godaddy, HugeDomains and a few others will be more than happy to see happen. But if it seems difficult to you now, then you will discover how much fun it will be to try to get some of those huge players to sign up for your service, or the amount of advertising you will be able to try to sell when there are hardly no users with the capacity to invest in domaining to visit your website. That's your audience!

It still amazes me how sometimes one is not able to see the big picture instead of one's own little limited world.

The monopolistic players are winning the game and I can no longer see any way to stop them from sweeping the board. They have already won, in fact. And people like you, instead of trying to think of ways to do things differently to preserve the market, all you do is play along with their game and help them in their task of erasing the small players, who are your real audience.

Congratulations. A flawless strategy. Good luck with that.

 

[MadAboutDomains]

Shame we can't open a better site. That site shouldn't cost a lot to run at all for the good of the community.

 

[kor]

why i am seeing 10$ per month for me and 60$ yearly , have you doubled the price ?

What do you get when you divide $60 by 12?

 

[Recons.Com]

I have built a large portfolio over the years without ever feeling I needed the services of namebio. I probably visited the site once or twice a year but stopped after all those monetization experiments started.

I feel like the way it is going is wrong. And will result in loss of visitors which, in turn, will also push away the advertisers.

 

[DomainNature]

A reason to not visit that website at all, you have economy my time.

 

[alcy]

Don't know if it is the wrong section (@ admins please change if there is something better for it).

Did anyone noticed the fact that namebio only shows five search results from now on too?

Show attachment 235326


I guess we will need a membership for (full) results now - which is defenetly worth it for sure:
Show attachment 235327

No problem with that but i did not read about a statement at all (social media, etc.) - am i missing something?

are u serious your pic showing 5 results? if.he show 5 then.he might as well show 1 or nothing..same thing...

 

[kor]

I think this would be a difficult model because every action you take is a search, and it will be hard for people to follow. Change the sort, that's another search. Paginate, that's another search. Paginate back one, another search.

Either you have no idea about software development or you are a very sneaky manipulator!

 

[zomainhacks]

I think that regular namebio contributors should not have to pay for the membership.

 

[magnificentdomains]

I think if it's definitely worth it. It probably isn't if you are just dabbling in the niche. In that case you could just use their limited results with GD appraiser similar sales and that should suffice. But it's definitely important data for investors and also reasonable.

 

[Fayaz Ahmed]

I don't care about FREE account to be honest. 100, 10, 5, or 0 - it's up to the company. If they failed to monetize the free users from Ads, then it doesn't make sense to entertain the free accounts. Totally understandable.

But previously it was 100 results per search for free accounts & now it's 25 results for $10/month (or $60/year)!
That's not something I understand. I get more sales record from Namepros & Twitter, with screenshots.

I hope I'm getting something wrong. What's the catch really?

IMHO, keep the price point, do whatever you want with the free account, but increase the Results Per Search for your paid accounts. That'll be reasonable.

How about: 250, 500 & 2000 Results Per Search for $10, $25 & $100 accounts respectively (with 50% yearly subscription discount as it already is)?

I'd be interested with $10/month ($60/year) account if it shows 250 Results per search (or something close). Otherwise I don't need it really. I only have 150 or so names. I used to check namebio to somewhat understand the trend, I don't use it for pricing.

In any case, I only wish you all the best
Fayaz.

 

[Jv1999]

i formed an opinion as to why NB got greedy all of a sudden when they posted that they sold NB 2 years ago.

Everytime a company sells out, it devaluates. Both online and irl, like Dan.com.

It's obvious the buyers want their investment back + profit... so they've made an executive order to increase monetization attempts. This is hte result.

I mean, i see that it's a small niche industry "and ads aren't cutting it" despite millions of searches daily and 350k uniques yearly... but conversion for ads is usually 1%. 10,000 is 1% of 1,000,000.

You could always apply AdSense instead of domaining ads. Domainers are people too lol and we visit normal sites and click on regular, pertinent ads.

I guess making $5,000 per month from AdSense isn't enough for the new buyers, who probably bought NB for a sum.

So now we have both ads and this premium membership tier that no one's happy about because the search results are too low... so they increased it in real time.

 

[johnn]

No one is working for free but you expect everything is free.

 

[Domainication]

Thanks @Michael for clearing things up!
(and thank you too for leading me the way to pay by paypal - that was exactly what i'm looking for)

I'm happy to stay as a customer to support namebio with my subscription.

The only suggestion i got is that you really need to communicate those major changes before they go live.
Then the panic we all got would be smoother at all. There are so many great 'Bloggers' in the industry (like @DomainSherpa, etc.) or social media where you could have told about the upcoming movement and the reasons why it is necessary.

I would have totally enjoyed an written interview between you and our high class Blogger @Bob Hawkes here on namepros f.e.

 

[Fayaz Ahmed]

Looks like name bio updated their count somewhat. Now:

1/ 10 results for non-logged in users.
2/ 25 results for logged-in free users.
3/ 100 results for $10/month ($60/year) users.
4/ 500 results for $25/month ($144/year) users.
5/ 2500 results for $100/month ($600/year) users.

It's much better now @Michael

 

[JB Lions]

Thanks, much appreciated!

That's a fair point, I should have communicated the change better. I wrote up a blog post (where some of my initial reply to this thread came from), but decided to hold off on publishing it at the last minute. For something major like getting rid of the free version entirely, or raising prices, I definitely would have published something. But since it was just a more restricted free version, I guess I was worried I might turn it into a bigger deal than it is by making an announcement. Sorry, bad call.

I think there might be issues with the reset code. Tried to login, got Invalid Credentials, Then hit Forgot Password link and not getting any emails to reset. Not in SPAM folder either.

I think $60 a year is fair, but you might get more signups if you bumped it up to 100 results per search. 25 a little low.

 

[VivifyDomains]

Seems pretty reasonable to me, it's a hugely useful tool that has been free for a very long time and still technically is but even the paid plans are nothing compared with the value you get.

 

[Michael]

Yes, they can grab all those customers in the very lucrative "won't pay $10/month but will pay $1/month" niche.

Lol, it's actually as low as $5/mo if you pay annually. Not much room to go down from there.