How does the capital domain zone .MOSCOW live three years after its launch?

Since the launch of the metropolitan domain zone .moscow passed
three and a half years. According to the REG.RU registrar, for several years the number of registered domain names in two .moscow zones and Moscow should have reached 350 thousand registrations. Did the predictions come true, what names and for how many cybersquatters bought, what domains are sold for 150 million rubles each. and what lives zone. moscow I tell below. This article is a general overview of the domain zone, it contains extracts from a study conducted on .moscow domains for several months. The sample contained more than 5,000 names.

History reference

For a start, a little excursion into history. On June 20, 2011, at the ICANN conference (International Corporation that Manages the Internet Address Space) in Singapore, the program for creating new domain zones NewGtld was approved. From now on, any organization could apply for the creation of a top-level domain, paying only for its consideration, regardless of the outcome, $ 185,000, but even this price did not deter those who wanted to. Upon completion of the collection of applications for NewGtld, .app (13 applications) took the lead; .home and .inc (11 applications); .art (10 applications) and other zones, among which .shop, .news, were also applied for the Russian zones Moscow,. Children, .rus and, in fact, for the domain .moscow. The Foundation for the Advancement of Internet Technology and Infrastructure Development (FAITID) became the initiator of the creation of the zones Moscow and. Moscow. In April 2014, the domains were delegated, i.e. available online, and already on June 10 the first stage of the registration of names began.

Who earned the most from the gold rush?
One who sold spades

On January 8, 2018, there were 21,097 registered domains in the .moscow zone. Even a third of the claimed figure of 350 thousand is far away. The value of about 20,000 domains is kept quite stable, the peak was the figure of 28,014 names registered on February 13, 2016. According to the ntldstats.com service, on the registration schedule, this day was the last before mass drops began to outweigh a year after the launch of free registration.
')

We can observe the same decline in a year, in February 2017, and in almost a year - in December. The picture is typical for any domain zone, but do not rush to conclusions if you think that a rollback to a quarter of all domains is a file. Let's take a look at a similar picture of the domain zone of the capital of Germany - .berlin, the graph of that and does resemble P-failure.



The thing is that from 16 to 20 June 2014 for the .berlin zone there was a promotional price of 5.55 euros for registration for a year, for the first day the shares of enterprising domainers registered over 67,000 domains, and a year later and a month for the same several days registrations sank twice. You do remember who earned the most from the gold rush? True, those who sold shovels. A simple calculation of 89,900 * 5.55 reveals that 5 days of the promotion brought the registrars almost half a million euros. The current prices for registering domains .berlin bite - 4.99 euros per month and, accordingly, 59.88 per year excluding promotions and discounts. But even with such a price, the domain zone significantly outstripped the .moscow number of registrations.

I'm going to live in London

Below is a table that allows you to compare the performance of the domain zones of capitals that were launched at about the same time - in 2014, the data are as of January 8, 2018 (data from ntldstats.com).


Pay attention to such an important indicator as the percentage of parked domains (or domains without a site), for the .moscow zone it is only 38%, whereas, for example, in the .paris of such domains there is a large part. In fairness it should be noted about a couple of months ago, this value and in .moscow reached 50%, or even more. Interesting is also the activity of buyers on the first day of the start of open sales at a single price: if Tokyo almost reached the mark of 10,000, Berlin flew far behind the top ten, and London caught up on the second day, jumping over 30,000 registrations, then we reached 10,000 only on the fifth day, i.e. 5th of December.

How much did you pay for the domain you also wanted
or big, but five, small, but three

By the way, about the registration periods. As you already know, when starting a new domain zone, there are three key stages of registration in the following order:

the stage of priority registration for trademark holders, the so-called Sunrise stage;

the stage of premium registration, when a domain name can be registered by anyone, but at a price higher than the standard price;

the stage of free registration, when everyone can register a domain at the standard price of the selected registrar.

For the month of priority registration from June 10 to July 10, 2014, in order to protect trademarks, they hurried to acquire their domains Apple inc., McDonalds. On the same dates, FAITID registered strategic metro.moscow, kremlin.moscow and others. True, none of the domains is not used for its intended purpose.

The next step was the registration for trademarks registered in the Russian Federation. They were also given a month for priority registration from July 15 to August 13. The second tier went cheaptrip.moscow, metropolis.moscow, tsum.moscow, vesti.moscow, just over a hundred domain names.

Finally, the third and final stage of registration took place from August 19 to 25, 2014, during which owners of business names, appellations of origin, media and NGOs registered in the Moscow region received priority registration rights, bringing in about a dozen registrations.

Premium registration opened on September 24, 2014. Let me remind you that the stages of premium registration differed in price, which decreased by periods. Starting price was 225 thousand rubles, allowed to buy a domain for this money Cinema "Moscow" on Okhotny Ryad (cinema.moscow), German car concern Opel (opel.moscow), owner of the TV channel "Moscow 24" holding "Moscow Media" ( m24.moscow, agency.moscow), developer of the RC Park Park LLC Rechnikov Invest (river-park.moscow), in the same period the domain of the studio of Artemy Lebedev (artlebedev.moscow) was registered.

The following stages, from 180 to 22.5 thousand, also did not cause an influx of buyers, clenching their fists, everyone was waiting for a decline to 4.5 thousand, until that moment only “gold” names of housekeeping were recorded, such as café.moscow, shop.moscow, pizza.moscow - gone for 45 thousand rubles, sushi.moscow, sale.moscow, hostel.moscow, coffee.moscow, tea.moscow, beer.moscow - went for 22.5 thousand rubles each. Of course, the most active day was December 1, 2014 - the first day of free registration at the standard price, which at that time was 600 rubles, brought more than 5,000 new domain names.

Gone!
Who moved to .moscow and settled there

So we, at last, smoothly passed to the main question - who needs it. Who managed to move to new domains and who is patiently waiting for the flow of people willing to move to .moscow to increase? Placed on the new addresses and, it seems, do not regret, the Metropolis shopping center mentioned above, which previously used a less resonant address (www.metropolis-center.ru), the Metropol hotel, the projects of the restaurateur Ilya Tyutenkov are notorious in the capital Ugolyok, Uilliam's, Pinch, "Northerners", which opened after 10 years of inactivity, the legendary restaurant "Aragvi", a small network of "Chinese News". The list of restaurants and cafes can be continued, probably, it is difficult to argue with the statement that for no other sphere did the new geographical domain become such a great gift as for HoReCa. Nearby you can put perhaps different geo-referenced viewing projects like insider.moscow or places.moscow and tourist portals. Mirrors for the main sites have created their projects in the zone. Moscow largest literary portals "poetry.ru and Proza.ru".

Moscow Government Ardently Supporting the Initiative
to create a separate domain zone, it has not yet decided to move to new addresses until the end. The City Health Department became the leader, which was located at several addresses depzdrav.moscow, doctor.moscow and healthy.moscow, and the Department of Nature Management and Environmental Protection moved, most of them, the addresses of the new domain became redirects to the Government portal, still located on mos.ru. Some well-known brands did the same: the Swatch group has registered domain names for the watch brands Longines, Tissot and Rado, the BMW auto concern has bmw.moscow, rolls-royce.moscow and mini.moscow addresses. The bulk of the brands did not bother to register their domain names to the delight of cybersquatters.

Sell ​​a free domain for the price of already occupied

Registered not by the owners of the brands, but by the adventurous homeowners, the names elle, adamas, letu, oldi, get, gazprom, the names of fashion brands Chanel, Gucci, H & M, but Louis Vuitton, Max Mara, Dolce & Gabanna did not fear cybersquatters, and true, domains with these names are still available for registration at the time of publication.

According to the most conservative estimates, up to 30% of all names registered in the .moscow zone are put up for sale at the moment. Basically, the domainers publish offers at auctions and in the stores of domains of large registrars, from international sites in the lead, of course, SEDO. Most of the sellers are private domainers, but there are also offers from organizations such as, for example, Innovation HQ Inc., registered in Antigua and Barbuda, the main (and only) page of the site of which says that the company is interested in purchasing domains that do not violate rights on intellectual property. The guys from Domains Moscow, who are based on the site of the same name, seriously approached the issue: there are almost two hundred domains in the portfolio, divided into categories, among them pepsi.moscow, tsvetnoy.moscow, bear.moscow and others. But judging by the fact that some of these domains have long been free, the site is orphaned. “Premium domains Moscow.”, Salename.org, foreign fancy.domains and other domain players are working in the same direction. With the start of sales in 2014-2015, quite a lot of projects started, offering domains bought in. Moscow and Moscow, but the excitement that arose around the launch zones began to subside and only those who have interests in other zones have remained until now.

How to sell a domain for $ 4.6 million?

Of course, transactions in the domain market are a secret, which no one is in a hurry to disclose. Regularly publishes sales statistics of Dnjournal, besides it there are several other services with a base of transactions, but unfortunately, on international platforms, in Russia, Andrei Kotelnikov published his blog data on his enthusiasm and developed script for a long time, now he doesn’t. Isn't this forming six-digit expectations for those who want to sell the newly registered name?

275 million rubles - that’s what home.moscow owners want for a domain. In the top also med.moscow, car.moscow - 150 million rubles each, “only” 100 million want for doc.moscow (by the way, 2 months ago it was only 50 million). For comparison, the two largest transactions over the past year, which fell on the .com zone, weighed "only" 2.89 million dollars (fly.com) and 2 million dollars (Freedom.com), which is, respectively, 165 and 114 million. rubles.


For two and three characters are generally expensive. The average price of four two-character domains put up for sale is 1.4 million, and a three-character and even more - almost 3 million. A four-character average is worth the same 1.4 million rubles, but here the “home” .moscow, without which the average price already tends to four hundred thousand rubles.

Up to 40% of all domains for sale go there immediately after registration, on average, it takes up to 1 month. Then the surge comes closer to 6 months and by the year: the first ones have already “sufficiently survived”, the second ones need to be renewed so as not to solve the dilemma of the drops or surcharge for another year, the standard picture for any domain zone. But put up for sale, domains, on average, are currently hanging for 10 months. Domains are just like people: the younger, the more optimistic you look to the future. Almost all record-breaking names on demand were registered in the current, 2017.

Once again, I note that the prices indicated are not the real value of transactions, but the expectations of the owners of the domains for their sale, i.e. published on the sites price domains. Who buys domains at this price is an open question. During the study on circumstantial evidence (change of data on the domain), only a couple of cases of change of ownership were registered, not confirmed by the information on the sale of the specified addresses.

Statistics on single characters and double characters

While free domains diverge from registrars is not so active. Let us turn to one and two characters, they became available for registration in the .moscow zone from December 8, 2016. True, until now the demand for them cannot be called active even with a stretch. The leader of registrations RU-CENTER offers to buy single-character .moscow domains for 51,590 rubles, the price for two-character starts from 13,990 rubles, and for some combinations like fm it comes to the price of the one-character names already mentioned. REG.RU's price is a bit nicer: a standard two-character cost of 12,350 rubles, 45,500 for fm.moscow, the same for a single-character name.


Dvukhsimolvolnikov just a little more than 1000, occupied at the beginning of January 2018 only 2%. And this is traditionally two news: good and bad. The good thing is that both among the two-character combinations and in the whole in the .moscow zone there are enough names, the bad one is the same - if there are enough names, the demand is low. There is quite a place where you can disperse in single-characters - all possible are free (except for stop words, which are 6%, that is, 2 of the 36 characters that can be used in a single-character domain).

A little bit about the unrealizable

About the stop list of the registry of domain names, i.e. those who cannot be registered, it is worth telling some more undoubtedly sad facts. Sad because, as it should be, he absorbed a lot of the most recognizable, the most delicious, the most key names. You can’t register travel and visit.moscow, get hr.moscow for now (but you can buy hr.club for 803,600 rubles, while free), as well as the domain of business youth bm.moscow. You can not register and dvuhsimvolniki, consisting of numbers, unless they (the numbers) do not repeat or one of them is zero. One-character domains will not register with i.moscow and m.moscow.

From Moscow to Yerevan

It is interesting to look at the geography of those interested - those who bought domains for resale. Of course, the absolute leader of registrations is Moscow, but apart from Muscovites, they are quite actively invested in other cities of Russia, as well as the domainers of Armenia, Germany, the United States and other countries, which sometimes is very useful. You cannot register a domain with the name russia.moscow, it belongs to the stop list of the registry of domain names, but if you are a resident of a town in the administrative district of Stuttgart and you prefer russland.moscow, then no one will interfere. By the way, in the same stop list, it is ulitsa.moscow, which is especially disappointing if you are a resident of St. Petersburg and have already bought fonar.moscow, and noch is still free. True, apteka.moscow was purchased at the very beginning of registration. And, of course, where, if not in St. Petersburg, it would occur to you to buy flot.moscow, where it was registered.



That's all. If you would be interested to know something else, leave your comments, and just leave. See you again!