When we are paying for a renewal, what are we really paying for?

[snailman]

I mean, I get that, they'll drag your ass outta your domain and all that. But what exactly do they DO for these $ 8,10,15, 19,99 or whatever. What kind of effort is needed on behalf of the registrar to extend your registration date? If not much, why aren't we all do it ourselves?

 

[iowadawg]

To keep order on the internet.

 

[DU]

I mean, I get that, they'll drag your ass outta your domain and all that. But what exactly do they DO for these $ 8,10,15, 19,99 or whatever. What kind of effort is needed on behalf of the registrar to extend your registration date? If not much, why aren't we all do it ourselves?

When a domainer marks it up from $8 to anything aren't they asking end users to pay them for doing even less?

 

[Domainace]

You can do it yourself. For a couple thousand dollars a year (after your larger initial investment), you will be able to register names directly through your own personal registrar - saving 30 cents or more per name. After you have 10,000 names or so, you will start to see actual savings!

 

[Sorror]

It all goes for travel expenses. They check if your domain is working properly from Bahamas and stuff.

 

[snailman]

You can do it yourself. For a couple thousand dollars a year (after your larger initial investment), you will be able to register names directly through your own personal registrar - saving 30 cents or more per name. After you have 10,000 names or so, you will start to see actual savings!

30 cents or more? I hope you do not imply that godaddy pays $14,6 per domain per year to some unknown entity. Or even $10,6, or $7,7. So other than collecting 18 cents for ICANN or whatever, what exactly do they do for your $10/15 per year?

 

[FPForum]

If it's with a larger registrar then most of that money is probably going into their checking accounts. Paying someone like GoDaddy a $10 renewal fee (considering what they are probably paying for the actual renewal) is probably a pretty nice chunk in their pockets. We're just paying to keep the name and not have to deal with moving it..etc.

 

[biggie]

I pay the $8.50 renewal fee on my name, because it makes $$$$ per year in ppc.

so in essence, I'm paying a renewal fee to get the profits that nobody would be getting, if it went unregistered.

 

[snailman]

I pay the $8.50 renewal fee on my name, because it makes $$$$ per year in ppc.

so in essence, I'm paying a renewal fee to get the profits that nobody would be getting, if it went unregistered.

Yes but that wasn't the question

 

[snailman]

If it's with a larger registrar then most of that money is probably going into their checking accounts. Paying someone like GoDaddy a $10 renewal fee (considering what they are probably paying for the actual renewal) is probably a pretty nice chunk in their pockets. We're just paying to keep the name and not have to deal with moving it..etc.

Ok, so you saying they do nothing. In this case, why don't you pay me $5 per year per domain instead of 10-15 to Godaddy? I could totally do nothing for $5 per year!

 

[Dave_Z]

I mean, I get that, they'll drag your ass outta your domain and all that. But what exactly do they DO for these $ 8,10,15, 19,99 or whatever. What kind of effort is needed on behalf of the registrar to extend your registration date? If not much, why aren't we all do it ourselves?

If you meet the fees and requirements to become a .com registrar:

http://www.verisigninc.com/en_US/channel-resources/become-a-registrar/index.xhtml

Then you can do what you asked. If I recall correctly, though, you need at least US$ 60,000 upfront (and that's at least).

 

[david64]

They have some infrastructure to maintain to ensure the domains work + some of the price is to keep bottom feeders out. I'd be interested to know how much profits are made by the exec.s though.

 

[N-A]

http://ntldstats.com/tld/wtf

They have some infrastructure to maintain to ensure the domains work + some of the price is to keep bottom feeders out. I'd be interested to know how much profits are made by the exec.s though.

Which execs? ICANN is a nonprofit-organization as they lessen the burden on the US government. They don't make profit. However, they can keep paying their execs more and more each year. They only pay salaries of $27 million with AKRAM ATALLAH (COO/Former CEO for FY2013) making a mere $650,000 a year of that (a pay raise of $150,000 from FY2012, that is well justified by reduction in pay to ROD BECKSTROM of $297,122-the highest paid exec at just under $1 million) which could be skewed as there are "other expenses" in addition to that. If you gave each employee the same wages, it would amount to about $62,000 per head if their LinkedIn profile is accurate on employee count (don't want to count them page by page). As mentioned by @Sorror they could go to the Bahama's for business if "necessary" and count that as an expense on top of everything.

They could have even got away with paying the typical $350/hourly rate for a Rolls-Royce Phantom chauffeur service at ICANN 51 in Los Angeles for all their VIP attendees/execs and first class flights for all too. Who fly's economy with those 18 cent fees per domain? Watch out for ICANN 52 in Singapore though, expenses will go up to nearly $5k every 10 hours for a Phantom. Anyone attend and see RR's rolling around? Or just Town Cars? I'm sure they weren't pulling up in yellow taxis or Toyota Prius rentals.

Verisign execs can make what they want, in addition, as a corporation: profit. They're not a NPO like ICANN, so you can't tell how much they make or spend on what to an extent (though they are somewhat transparent with reports to show why they have to charge what they do to keep shareholders happy). Knowing that they're getting $7.85 per .com (as pointed out by @Dave_Z with a little digging); assuming 100 million are renewed (as they're grouping .com and .net into 1 outdated report here, I don't have the exact number and it fluctuates every second), they are making $785 million on .com's in revenue alone.

Though, take a look at their average DNS queries per day on page 5 of that report. They averaged 82 billion daily queries across all TLD's they manage and it's an upward trend. To put that into perspective, I use DNSMadeEasy so that if an IP has to change, a site will propagate around the world to resolve instantly without changing name servers. A Corporate Membership there is allotted 50,000,000 queries per month with a $124.95/month subscription. This roughly translates to $120,492,054 per month when you add in 100 million domain names and 82 billion queries daily to be paid by Verisign for DNSMadeEasy services.

They make it quite clear what the implications of a DNS outage would be: revenue losses being a big one and an impact to customers and strategic partners which is more of what you would feel.

However, who needs DNS when we could all just download the zone files with P2P sharing? They can be 50 megabytes to a mere 10 gigabytes. That could cut costs right there. Nevertheless, multiply that by 1000+ cc/s/g/TLD's, though you could opt-out of .wtf if you wished at that point, saving you a couple megabytes. You would only need quite the computer to process your request and a lot of storage that you can burn right through with write-after-write.

I'm sure you can sleep easy at night knowing that the Verisign execs make some millions of that and have golden parachutes as well (since the CEO holds 395,505 shares; valued at $22 million today), as they should, it's a capitalist economic system which keeps people, well, let's leave that for a politics thread.

A new .com is registered nearly every second and this took me about 15 minutes to write and rant so I could cite what I believe to be legitimate sources and we could all learn a bit. During that time, Verisign made $7,065, while a NPO like ICANN walked away with only $162 in 18 cent fees.

...where does my money go? (Though, I don't need to worry as @biggie said, my .com's pay for themselves) O.o

To be honest, I think the execs are taking all the money as clearly stated by ICANN paying their top exec $595k (FY13). They have nearly no customer service at Network Solutions, can't reach anyone at Moniker and pretty poor at GoDaddy. Having said that, it's safe to say that their overhead is pretty low when it comes to personnel.

@iowadawg , @Domainace , @Grace Delete and @FPForum have valid points as well with @Dave_Z nailing it head on with the roundabout fees to become both an ICANN accredited registrar and rights granted by Verisign to sell .com domain names. Which, if you owned a lot of names, could be advantageous for you to do, but still could be a pain with transferring to end users. Just not win-win at that point. :P

In summary, I believe if I read @snailman 's question right, it's why does a registrar charge more than the $7.85 cost by Verisign in addition to the $0.18 ICANN fee per .com domain name? Sometimes less? It's business. They sell cheap to get a new customer and renew high, because they can as you have no other option if you want the name. It's pretty much win-win-win-win and high-fives all around the table for these guys.

...while domain investors look bad "squatting" on names trying to make a living in some cases, and we look bad...

 

[DU]

Everyone loves the American Dream until they find out that someone else is living it in their place, don't they.

 

[biggie]

Everyone loves the American Dream until they find out that someone else is living it in their place, don't they.

yes, we love the "idea" of the American Dream, but the "reality" of achieving it...on an "equal" basis, can never be restarted.

thus, the "bitterness, anxiety, frustration, etc." that is part of the exhaust from that engine we call Capitalism.



imo....

 

[N-A]

Everyone loves the American Dream until they find out that someone else is living it in their place, don't they.

Just kind of odd going over ICANN's Form 990's and seeing how much they get paid for "60 hour" weeks... in the Bahama's.

Comparing ICANN's executive wages to that of, I don't know, the American Red Cross' CEO was interesting. I had been unaware that their highest salary was nearly $1 million in 2012 (though, I didn't dig 10 years). I mean, someone had to take the leftovers to be "non-profit". Who better than the CEO?

I wonder how much the CEO will make for FY14 and FY15 after all these gTLD strings and multi-million dollar auctions fighting over them ends. How about a $280mm Boeing 747-400? I mean it would be best if they outfitted the entire plane to be first class and flew all their employees at once making pit-stops wherever they wanted. I'm sure it would pay for itself over and over again. If a ticket is around $10,000 for first class and they had to fly all 449 employees internationally, they saved $4.5 million dollars alone (excluding gas and their overly paid pilots of course).

Then again, the NFL is a NPO (in a different class) as well.

Anybody know if ICANN fees are charitable donations? 18 cents adds up...