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ICM price cut sees 10 times more .xxx sales
Kevin Murphy,
June 2, 2013, 17:54:23 (UTC),
Domain Registries
ICM Registry saw 13,348 newly added .xxx domain name registrations in May, a period during which it and its registrars were offering the names at .com prices.
That’s more than 10 times the volume it shifted in January, the last month for which official numbers are available.
ICM dropped the registry fee for .xxx from $62 to $7.85 for the whole month, ostensibly (though not actually, I suspect) as part of its antitrust settlement with PornTube owner Manwin Licensing.
Registrants could register names for periods of up to 10 years at the promotional pricing, and registrants appear to have taken advantage.
The number of add-years for May was 25,733, according to ICM, an average of 1.9 years per name. That’s compared to its January rate of 1.37, when the .com average, for comparison, was 1.24.
About a quarter of the newly added names had been previously registered at full price and later allowed to drop.
The .xxx namespace now holds over 122,000 domains, still off its December 2012 peak of 142,000, according to the company.
10 times more volume at just over 1/10th of the price. 1 x $62.50 = $62.50. 10 x $7.85 = $78.50. Not that huge a difference. Great for registrars (more customers to sell other stuff to), not an enormous difference for the registry.
Given that most of its fixed per-domain costs are the same, I’d guess it made less profit too.
Harder to estimate what the longer-term benefits might be, however.