There is still some very nice fruit left on the .pro tree. Keywords that might have been too niche, too akward with the extension, or not commercially focused enough to keep fed and watered with $99 goggles on, look prettier at $20. I wouldn't have registered Jumbo.pro and Pronto.pro for $99 but if it's costing me the equivalent of a CD per year as opposed to a CD player, I make different decisions.
I still think reg fees have got to fall further for .pro to catch on. At $20-$30 they are still 2-3 times more expensive than other gTLD's and if you are also 100 less well known, you don't need take Donald Trump to tell you that's not going to work.
People talk about .pro being a luxury or high end product so it justifies a higher reg fee. Economically and practically, that doesn't make sense. Luxury brands charge a premium because they spend millions of dollars on advertising, packaging, and sponsorship to convince people to pay a premium price. RegistryPro don't do anything like that.
Practically, the .pro regging experience is a nightmare compared to registering any other gTLD. You have little choice of registrar, you can't transfer .pros between registrars, often what you register doesn't end up getting registered (Encirca is the only reliable registrar in my experience), the front end of all .pro registrars is archaic, you get bugged for AV details or you don't get bugged for AV details, then you get an email threatening to cancel your .pro.
Last night, I registered Patient.pro at DomainPeople. I waited 30 minutes but the WHOIS didn't get updated so I had to go and register it at Encirca. For the last week, I couldn't register anything at DomainPeople from my home PC, when I searched for any .pro, the site returned a greyed out selection box for all .pro I queries. It might have something to do with Firefox because I use Internet Explorer at work and it was fine there. I've never been able to register anything at Hostway.com period.
RegistryPro have got to reduce the price of .pro to $10 for new registrations and renewals, get rid of AV checking, focus on professional use vetting, and sign up some reliable volume registrars. Presumably, its the AV checking that puts off registrars like Godaddy and Moniker. Also, what happened to Melbourne IT, I can't believe RegistryPro announced this and Melbourne IT are still not offering .pro.
The worst case scenario is that RegistryPro leave renewal fees significantly higher than new registrations. If they do, the people who regged at $20 are going to drop the lot in 2009 and we are going to be right back where we started.
If I was running .pro, I'd offer them 10%-20% cheaper than .com, .pro is a substitute product and has to be discounted against the real macoy just like supermarket own brand cereals have to be cheaper than Kelloggs.
I'd get rid of AV checking because it's unworkable and results in a lack of registrar interest, to make real progress you have to take .pro to the customer, you can't expect customers to find .pro. Every registrar has got to offer .pro.
Professional use is .pro's unique selling proposition, it's a good thing, when I had 1m .pro registrations at $7, I'd sweep every resolving .pro for porn, cancel the lot, and spend $10m publicising that fact in the media. Then I'd do the same with spammers.
If you combined discounted reg fees, no AV checking to encourage mass registrar adoption, and lethal anti-porn and anti-spam policing, .pro could become a genuine alternative to .com for business use within 10 years.
