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.

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

I don't use Afternic...
+ they banned Ukraine on their idiotic firewall, last ~5 years it doesn't work for me at all.

2018 for me was a few times better, even without Afternic.

 

[DNGear]

I don't use Afternic...
+ they banned Ukraine on their idiotic firewall, last ~5 years it doesn't work for me at all.

2018 for me was a few times better, even without Afternic.

It must be a huge barrier to you. 75% of my sales were from AN only.

You would get some better deals if you were able to list them with BIN prices.

 

[Armageddon]

I don't use Afternic...
+ they banned Ukraine on their idiotic firewall, last ~5 years it doesn't work for me at all.

2018 for me was a few times better, even without Afternic.

I don't use Afternic at all for any domains i have - IMO is worst marketplace ever

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

Few tens I have listed/parked on Sedo with BINs...
But still no luck... even in mid $xxx range.
This year is definitely not mine.

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

Regarding the mentioned node...
I can't recall exactly... but very probably - in the past it was in my .PROfolio.

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

.PRO has ~15 times less domains than another Afilias TLD .info
PARADOX...
But with stupid Afilias in terms of marketing - this is a reality...
What they do 8 years (since purchased .PRO) - I don't know... just wasted 8 years.

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

.PRO celebrated 15th anniversary this year...
Afilias didn't anything... even minimal press release for this event...
True idiots.

.PRO lives and grows just on its endusers...
Registry can only block the domains, that's all they can.

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

And I don't know any other TLD with closed 3char domains... they are not available even for premium fee.
Unique anomaly.
So 8 wasted years with Afilias in all aspects.

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

I also recently rechecked BF/CM deals at many registrars...
And none of them offered .PRO
This is how Afilias "works" with registrars... full inactivity - in other words.

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

Even regarding their accreditation...
During last 8 years (Afilias era of inactivity) - many registrars were accredited only after my own efforts...
Dynadot, Namecheap, 1and1, domain.com etc.

 

[jmcc]

Top 50 registrars for .PRO (August 2019)
Totals 336109
NameCheap, Inc 60418
Tucows Domains Inc. 53287
GoDaddy.com, LLC 40098
Regional Network Information Center, JSC dba RU-CENTER 24217
OVH sas 21634
Name.com LLC 18345
Alibaba Cloud Computing Ltd. d/b/a HiChina (www.net.cn) 14297
PDR Ltd. d/b/a PublicDomainRegistry.com 9455
Danesco Trading Ltd. 9106
Gandi SAS 7989
Dynadot, LLC 7050
Hosting Ukraine LLC 6067
Network Solutions, LLC 5887
Key-Systems GmbH 5291
Encirca Inc. 3834
1&1 IONOS SE 3740
GMO Internet, Inc. d/b/a Onamae.com 3506
Namesilo, LLC 2525
DomainPeople, Inc. 2344
Soluciones Corporativas IP, SLU 2304
Chengdu West Dimension Digital Technology Co., Ltd. 2057
101domain GRS Ltd 2031
eNom, Inc. 1994
Internet Domain Service BS Corp 1480
1API GmbH 1400
EPAG Domainservices GmbH 1286
Hosting Concepts B.V. dba Openprovider 1268
Mesh Digital Limited 1098
FBS Inc. 1096
United-domains AG 956
Ascio Technologies, Inc. Danmark - Filial af Ascio technologies, Inc. USA 829
Ligne Web Services SARL 747
Realtime Register B.V. 740
OnlineNIC, Inc. 709
MarkMonitor Inc. 671
Gransy s.r.o. d/b/a subreg.cz 658
EuroDNS SA 650
CSC Corporate Domains, Inc. 630
Porkbun LLC 623
NETIM SARL 604
Uniregistrar Corp 592
PSI-USA, Inc. dba Domain Robot 574
REGISTER.IT SPA 567
CSL Computer Service Langenbach GmbH d/b/a joker.com 548
Xiamen Chinasource Internet Service Co.,Ltd. 546
Whois Networks Co., Ltd 532
Wild West Domains, LLC 522
Xin Net Technology Corporation 509

Regards...jmcc

 

[jmcc]

.PRO has ~15 times less domains than another Afilias TLD .info
PARADOX...
But with stupid Afilias in terms of marketing - this is a reality...
What they do 8 years (since purchased .PRO) - I don't know... just wasted 8 years.

Afilias is far from stupid when it comes to marketing. (See the Domnomics book on Amazon. The section covering what Afilias did with .INFO and why .PRO isn't larger is in the free "Look Inside" chapters.) Afilias basically invented discounting as a business model but it was other factors that hit .PRO badly. It was mainly the rise of the ccTLDs. When ICANN finally permitted .PRO to finally remove all restrictions, it was a bit too late but with about 330K regs as of the August 2019 ICANN report, it is not doing too badly. It should be around a million regs but .PRO isn't .INFO and still has some value on resales. If Afilias treated it more like .INFO with discounting offers, the resale value would crash.

Regards...jmcc

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

I don't talk about the discounting like .info
Afilias doesn't anything to .PROmote, full inactivity for 8 years of their .PRO ownership.

Do you see any registrar where .PRO is offered on main page?
Any social marketing, press releases, events etc. ?
Nothing! FULL INACTIVITY!

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

Many registrars are still not even accredited, after 15+ years!

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

@Dynadot (see stats above)
~2.5 times lower volume than even name.com has.

 

[jmcc]

I don't talk about the discounting like .info
Afilias doesn't anything to .PROmote, full inactivity for 8 years of their .PRO ownership.

The .PRO isn't really a Tier 1 gTLD. That's why the registrars only promote their local ccTLD, .COM, .NET, .ORG, discounting promotions and then everything else. Unfortunately, .PRO is in the everything else category.

Do you see any registrar where .PRO is offered on main page?
Any social marketing, press releases, events etc. ?
Nothing! FULL INACTIVITY!

The .INFO has become associated with boom and bust. But if Afilias started trying to do the same thing with .PRO, it would quickly lose out to the junk new gTLDs that are completely reliant on discounting and it would destroy any value in .PRO. As it stands, it is actually quite a good TLD. Afilias definitely needs to work with the registrars to promote it but the space on registrar pages is quite valuable and there's a lot of competition for it.

Regards...jmcc

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

It is not about tiers... Only enduser can decide what is Tier1, Tier2 or TierN...

Registrars promote only those TLDs which are paid/ordered by the corresponding registries...
In other words - they are encouraged by registries.
And Dynadot confirmed this statement when I asked them.

Afilias doesn't spend any money and time to .PROmote.
I'm sure that they even don't have the dedicated staff (.PRO department).

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

2018 for me was a few times better, even without Afternic.

Even in terms of inquiries...
Last year I had up to 3 weekly...
VS 1-2 monthly in 2019...

 

[Anna_M]

I don't use Afternic...
+ they banned Ukraine on their idiotic firewall, last ~5 years it doesn't work for me at all.

2018 for me was a few times better, even without Afternic.

Same AN firewall here : )

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

Regarding the mentioned node...
I can't recall exactly... but very probably - in the past it was in my .PROfolio.

Yes, I see it in my Bodis reports (archive).

So my congrats!

I let it expire among other less critical domains... It was a period with limited budget to transfer them all.