Fried Domaineer Facts

At the ICANN conference in Lisbon, Rob Hall, a renowned expert and major investor in the domain registrations market, delivered a report . This man clearly did not embarrass himself and began to cut the truth about how domain registrars actually conduct business, how much their assets are worth, etc.

Here are the transcripts of his speech, and here are some quotes from there translated into Russian .

WHOIS Protection
I think that GoDaddy with their domainbyproxy.com service was a pioneer in this area. Now almost every registrar provides such a service.

There is one interesting thing, and I would not judge now whether it is good or bad, we own such a service - Privacy.ca. I just want to draw your attention to this detail - in case of bankruptcy or a court decision against the service, from the point of view of the creditor, all domains of the service are its asset.
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And here's an example.

Now we are participating in court proceedings against a group of people involved in fraud at our domain auctions. Having started the lawsuit, we filed lawsuits against domain owners and one of the respondents was a personal data protection service provided by one registrar.

In case of victory in court, we could make financial claims to the service, and if they could not pay, we would declare that we will take as a payment, say, 400 thousand domains that have this service listed as the owner, and therefore, these domains are its property.

You must understand what personal data protection services are, how they can be attacked or sold separately from the registrar.

Portfolio for PPC systems
Typical pay-per-click portfolios are domains used to make money on pay-per-click systems, it does not include domain names like Business.com sold for millions of dollars. The price of such a portfolio in the sale can be obtained by multiplying the annual profit by 8-10. Our domain portfolio brings about three million dollars annually. This means that when sold, it can be estimated at 24-30 million dollars.

Sales of domain companies
I will give an example that may shock many. A couple of years ago, the media company Marchex acquired Altsearch for 164 million dollars, thus obtaining a portfolio of 300 thousand domains. At the same time Network Solutions was sold for $ 100 million, that is, cheaper. Network Solutions then supported 7 million domains, but it was not a portfolio, but client domains. Yes, this is true, but if we remember that 30% of domains are deleted annually, then deleting and intercepting 30% of domains out of 7 million costs much more than the 164 million Marchex spent. And this explains why the amount of the transaction for the sale of Network Solutions this year amounted to about 800-900 million dollars.

About future
What awaits us in the future? I think big changes are coming to the market of vacated domains. The market will continue to evolve. The market will become more intelligent. Registrars will merge, companies such as Pool, SnapNames, eNom will work together to make the market more efficient, because a more efficient market will bring more profits to all participants and increase the opportunities for customers.

Now we see that many domainers have reoriented from a mark of $ 6 dollars, to a mark of $ 4, when they decide to renew a domain or not. Some time ago, if we asked domainers if you would buy a domain that brings less than its cost price - the overwhelming majority would say no. Now, many acquire such domains, believing that they may have value in the future.

About domainer
The number of domainers is growing. Now it is a very serious industry. I will give an example to illustrate this - a recent conference was attended by more than 500 people, which is more than the number of delegates to the ICANN conference, and each of them paid $ 2,000 for two days of participation. The market has become mature, serious players are participating.

via Domain Blog