The .PRO Discussion

[InvisionTech]

It seems .PRO is slowly coming out of the cage with cheaper reg prices than they were a year ago and major registrars like netsol taking notice of the extension and promoting it.

Here are some that I picked up in last couple of days:

Alexandria.pro

Anchorage.pro

Arlington.pro

Belfast.pro

Birmingham.pro

Budapest.pro

Durham.pro

Fairfax.pro

Italian.pro

Lisbon.pro

Fire away with your regs after the relaunch on September 8th, 2008.

 

[Rob Monster]

OK, thanks.
I will keep in mind regarding transfers.

But you should lower your registration fee definitely... even without our requests...
$2.99 with Dynadot and few times higher at Epik...

Will discuss with @Sufyan Alani to find out what promo we are missing but the general theme is to bring volume. Registries like that, and we don't like to waste their time, or ours.

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

Will discuss with @Sufyan Alani to find out what promo we are missing but the general theme is to bring volume. Registries like that, and we don't like to waste their time, or ours.

This is Afilias.
And their .PROmo (1st year) is a few years old already... availabe for all registrars.

 

[jmcc]

This is Afilias.
And their .PROmo (1st year) is a few years old already... availabe for all registrars.

It is a double edged sword for registrars. The intitial price for the registration might be low, but the renewals on discounted domain names are generally not good. This means that the renewal on discounted registrations will be below 100% (often well below). It might be a better strategy to have country level targeting for offers complete with their own language subpages as well as a discount. Though the US is the largest country in the gTLD, there's a lot of geographical spread. NameCheap does seem to be focused on using discounting to drive volume and it has done it with a lot of the NGTs. Epik competing with NameCheap on discounting might be a race to the bottom.

Regards...jmcc

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

It is not only competing with NameCheap...
Currently many registrars are few times cheaper than Epik to reg .PRO
https://tld-list.com/tld/pro

 

[Rob Monster]

It is a double edged sword for registrars. The intitial price for the registration might be low, but the renewals on discounted domain names are generally not good. This means that the renewal on discounted registrations will be below 100% (often well below). It might be a better strategy to have country level targeting for offers complete with their own language subpages as well as a discount. Though the US is the largest country in the gTLD, there's a lot of geographical spread. NameCheap does seem to be focused on using discounting to drive volume and it has done it with a lot of the NGTs. Epik competing with NameCheap on discounting might be a race to the bottom.

Regards...jmcc

We'll focus on value and innovation while being competitive on renewals and transfers. If we get deals on new registrations, we'll pass those savings on to the bulk buyers who want to do some 1st year flips to get the domains into the hands of end-users before renewal day comes up. We did this successfully in July with $0.99 .CO promo that has led to many retail customers buying .CO in our after-market. We would do the same with .COM but we already maxed out our Q4 2019 rebate from Verisign in the first 4 days of October due to some large scale .com buyers.

Our promos are here:

https://www.epik.com/promos/

Just tell @Sufyan Alani if we are missing the boat on some essential promo and we'll work to deploy it swiftly -- all domains still come with our unmatched SSL landers which are great for flipping domains within the first year of registration when buying domains in bulk. Example:

https://laptopcomputers.com/

That topic is discussed extensively elsewhere notably here and here.

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

And it is not only about handregs...
With Dynadot API we can catch .PROs for $2.99
This is the main interest of all .PRO domainers here.

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

These are the top 5 countries by registrar from the May 2019 report:

US 37.45 %

This is due to Privacy service of Namecheap/Dynadot etc.
It is bound to the USA.

 

[jmcc]

We'll focus on value and innovation while being competitive on renewals and transfers. If we get deals on new registrations, we'll pass those savings on to the bulk buyers who want to do some 1st year flips to get the domains into the hands of end-users before renewal day comes up. We did this successfully in July with $0.99 .CO promo that has led to many retail customers buying .CO in our after-market. We would do the same with .COM but we already maxed out our Q4 2019 rebate from Verisign in the first 4 days of October due to some large scale .com buyers.

Some of the dynamics of the rebates and discounting are scary. (Looking at this from the registrars/hosters/markets side of things.) The public seems to be resisting the golden handcuffs registration offer for $0.99 COM regs with the full fee on the renewal. There also seems to be a consolidation trend with NET being badly hit by the increase and some of the other legacy gTLDs being affected by the trend. Was doing some work on the gTLDs by country over the last few days to see if there were patterns of new regisrations being associated with offers in various countries. US discounts tend to have strong renewals but some other countries tend to have very low renewals. That's why it may be better to target the offers/discounts.

Regards...jmcc

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

@namesilo
Just FYI: https://www.namepros.com/threads/the-pro-discussion.522420/page-318#post-7431413
Even 1and1 has more .PRO domains.

 

[jmcc]

This is due to Privacy service of Namecheap/Dynadot etc.
It is bound to the USA.

These are the new registrations for June 2019:
| NameCheap, Inc. | 4847 |
| Tucows Domains Inc. | 1437 |
| Name.com, Inc. | 1067 |
| GoDaddy.com, LLC | 912 |
| Danesco Trading Ltd. | 800 |
| Alibaba Cloud Computing Ltd. d/b/a HiChina (www.net.cn) | 539 |
| Dynadot, LLC | 276 |
| Regional Network Information Center, JSC dba RU-CENTER | 257 |
| Hosting Ukraine LLC | 241 |
| PDR Ltd. d/b/a PublicDomainRegistry.com | 220 |
| OVH sas | 171 |
| GMO Internet, Inc. d/b/a Onamae.com | 126 |
| Hosting Concepts B.V. d/b/a Openprovider | 121 |
| Key-Systems GmbH | 111 |
| Gandi SAS | 96 |
| 101domain GRS Limited | 71 |
| Internet Domain Service BS Corp | 67 |
| 1&1 IONOS SE | 66 |
| Chengdu West Dimension Digital Technology Co., Ltd. | 60 |
| Soluciones Corporativas IP, SL | 54 |
| Ligne Web Services SARL dba LWS | 52 |
| united-domains AG | 51 |
| Xiamen ChinaSource Internet Service Co., Ltd | 44 |
| Shanghai Meicheng Technology Information Development Co., Ltd. | 37 |
| Network Solutions, LLC | 29 |
| NameSilo, LLC | 28 |
| OnlineNIC, Inc. | 27 |
| eNom, LLC | 27 |
| URL Solutions, Inc. | 26 |
| 1API GmbH | 26 |
| Wild West Domains, LLC | 21 |
| Porkbun LLC | 19 |
| CSC Corporate Domains, Inc. | 17 |
| CSL Computer Service Langenbach GmbH d/b/a joker.com | 16 |
| EPAG Domainservices GmbH | 16 |
| Xin Net Technology Corporation | 14 |
| NETIM SARL | 14 |
| Regtime Ltd. | 13 |
| FBS Inc. | 12 |
| Online SAS | 12 |
| Whois Networks Co., Ltd. | 10 |
| PSI-USA, Inc. dba Domain Robot | 10 |
| Gransy, s.r.o. | 10 |
| Ascio Technologies, Inc. Danmark - Filial af Ascio technologies, Inc. USA | 10 |
| Realtime Register B.V. | 9 |
| Uniregistrar Corp | 9 |
| Mesh Digital Limited | 8 |
| Domeneshop AS dba domainnameshop.com | 8 |
| Reliable Software | 7 |
| Ledl.net GmbH | 6 |
| Dynadot17 LLC | 6 |
| AB Name ISP | 6 |
| MarkMonitor Inc. | 6 |
| Dinahosting s.l. | 5 |
| Register SPA | 5 |
| Dynadot0 LLC | 5 |
| Bizcn.com, Inc. | 5 |
| EuroDNS S.A. | 5 |
| Zhuimi Inc | 4 |
| Innovadeus Pvt. Ltd. | 4 |
| Dynadot2 LLC | 4 |
| Nics Telekomunikasyon A.S. | 4 |
| Instra Corporation Pty Ltd. | 4 |
| pair Networks, Inc. d/b/a pair Domains | 4 |
| 10dencehispahard, S.L. | 4 |
| Web4Africa Inc. | 3 |
| EnCirca, Inc. | 3 |
| INWX GmbH & Co. KG | 2 |
| PlanetHoster Inc. | 2 |
| Blacknight Internet Solutions Ltd. | 2 |
| Metaregistrar BV | 2 |
| Todaynic.com, Inc. | 2 |
| Marcaria.com International, Inc. | 2 |
| French Connexion SARL dba Domaine.fr | 2 |
| Dreamscape Networks International Pte Ltd | 2 |
| Paragon Internet Group Ltd t/a Paragon Names | 2 |
| Dynadot1 LLC | 2 |
| ALIBABA.COM SINGAPORE E-COMMERCE PRIVATE LIMITED | 2 |
| The Registrar Company B.V. | 1 |
| Super Registry Ltd | 1 |
| NameWeb BVBA | 1 |
| Net 4 India Limited | 1 |
| PSI-Japan, Inc. | 1 |
| Net-Chinese Co., Ltd. | 1 |
| Nom-iq Ltd. dba COM LAUDE | 1 |
| Nameshield SAS | 1 |
| Dynadot9 LLC | 1 |
| GKG.NET, INC. | 1 |
| http.net Internet GmbH | 1 |
| DomainPeople, Inc. | 1 |
| Namebay SAM | 1 |


Regards...jmcc

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

Few weeks ago NameCheap increased their regfee from $2.06 to $3.06
So their "best times" in terms of volume are already in the past.

 

[Sufyan Alani]

OK, thanks.
I will keep in mind regarding transfers.

But you should lower your registration fee definitely... even without our requests...
$2.99 with Dynadot and few times higher at Epik...

Hi Jurgen,
I'm working to bring it down for this one.
I'll keep you posted.

 

[jmcc]

Few weeks ago NameCheap increased their regfee from $2.06 to $3.06
So their "best times" in terms of volume are already in the past.

The problem with the registry reports is that they don't exactly line up on renewals/deletions. This what the top 10 by new registrations looks like:
Registrar - new - deleted - renewed
| NameCheap, Inc. | 4847 | 1554 | 679 |
| Tucows Domains Inc. | 1437 | 3317 | 1259 |
| Name.com, Inc. | 1067 | 66 | 205 |
| GoDaddy.com, LLC | 912 | 1035 | 1600 |
| Danesco Trading Ltd. | 800 | 473 | 165 |
| Alibaba Cloud Computing Ltd. d/b/a HiChina (www.net.cn) | 539 | 1501 | 314 |
| Dynadot, LLC | 276 | 131 | 81 |
| Regional Network Information Center, JSC dba RU-CENTER | 257 | 525 | 1234 |
| Hosting Ukraine LLC | 241 | 458 | 206 |
| PDR Ltd. d/b/a PublicDomainRegistry.com | 220 | 386 | 381 |
| OVH sas | 171 | 305 | 1398 |

And the June 2018 top 10 by new regs:
| OVH sas | 3183 | 602 | 1147 |
| Tucows Domains Inc. | 2945 | 1726 | 1069 |
| Alibaba Cloud Computing Ltd. d/b/a HiChina (www.net.cn) | 2093 | 450 | 174 |
| NameCheap, Inc. | 1748 | 7040 | 735 |
| GoDaddy.com, LLC | 1662 | 818 | 1237 |
| PDR Ltd. d/b/a PublicDomainRegistry.com | 360 | 412 | 362 |
| Regional Network Information Center, JSC dba RU-CENTER | 313 | 967 | 1251 |
| Danesco Trading Ltd. | 281 | 142 | 133 |
| Hosting Ukraine LLC | 234 | 392 | 162 |
| Dynadot, LLC | 221 | 187 | 42 |



Regards...jmcc

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

Because renewal at Namecheap is not competitive.
Domainers only reg(ged) there and then transfer-out for the discounted $5 to 1and1 (still works) or to other registrars...

 

[jmcc]

Because renewal at Namecheap is not competitive.
Domainers only reg(ged) there and then transfer-out for the discounted $5 to 1and1 (still works) or to other registrars...

Transfers are harder to track with these reports because a transfer gets a year added and the reports don't actually breakdown the transfers by registrar (the hoster stats data shows the gaining and losing hosters but I haven't had much time to add that data to the site).

Regards...jmcc

 

[jmcc]

Few weeks ago NameCheap increased their regfee from $2.06 to $3.06
So their "best times" in terms of volume are already in the past.

There is a seasonality to some of these offers and it is the run-up to Christmas and the end of the year at the moment. (Sales targets have to be met by the registries and registrars.) The Summer is generally a slow time and registrations are lower so they might need a bigger discount to get registrations and transfers. It also depends on the market that NameCheap is chasing. If it is end-users, then the Dollar increase might not be too worrying. If it is domainers and bulk registrants, it will slow down some of the registration rates. But NameCheap seems to hop from promotion to promotion. It was a serious player in some of the ex-Famous Four new gTLDs but those are collapsing at the moment. I think that some of the registries will be paying a lot of attention to how ORG's decision to stop discounting in 2018 is working out. As long as a registry covers its costs and can make a slight profit, discounting makes sense. But it also causes problems for the TLD. If the discounting is too deep and goes on for too long, it drives any development out of the TLD. The lack of discounting in ORG is also getting rid of a lot of parked/templated content sites and stabilising renewal rates. The problem with the discounting NGTs is that some of them have renewal rates of below 10%. Only the XYZ seems to be playing the discounting game well.

Regards...jmcc

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

Namecheap had $2.06 since June'2017 continiously...
And prior $2.06 they had a long period of $1.06

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

Due to various TRUE spammers/scammers at Namecheap - domainers and normal endusers got the blacklisted and blocked domains as well...
This was described on the previous pages...

And that's why they finally increased to $3.06 to minimize such issues.

 

[jmcc]

Namecheap had $2.06 since June'2017 continiously...
And prior $2.06 they had a long period of $1.06

Losing the discounted registration volume on the ex-FFM NGTs might have played some part in the decision to increase prices but there are other NGTs still discounting. PRO is unlike the NGTs in that it still has a solid base of registrations. I'm not sure about the pricing on other registrars but they could have been leaving money on table by being priced too low.

Regards...jmcc

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

I can say even more...
Namecheap has increased their .PRO fee exactly per MY feedbacks and suggestions...
Cumulatively I got 12 blocked .PRO domains by Afilias for the past few months... all under Namecheap.
So this Namecheap decision was right... too many false alarms for them... too many blocked GOOD customers.