Recent Posts
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Pricey .luxury made $500k already
The new gTLD .luxury seems to have sold more than $500,000 worth of domain names already.
(UPDATE: That’s probably not accurate. I seem to have misread some registrar pricing pages. The sunrise price was actually much lower than $1,000. See comments below.)
Saturday’s zone file for the Luxury Partners-owned TLD popped from 1 domain to 470 domains. Most of the new names appear to have been registered during the sunrise period, which ended early last week.
Given the current retail price of over $1,000, it seems .luxury is already a $500,000 business, at least for 2014. Renewal pricing is around the $700 mark, equating to $329,000 a year just on sunrise registrations.
That’s including the registrar markup, of course. The registry will be making a bit less.
“Luxury” brands such as Cartier and Formula 1 bought multiple domains during sunrise. Some tech firms, such as Facebook and Google, continued their blanket approach to defensives.
With such a high price, one wonders what some of these rights holders are thinking: do they really believe cybersquatters are prepared to drop $700 a year infringing their brands?
Sadly there are already a couple of examples of newbie squatters spending absurd sums on clearly infringing new gTLD domains.
It will be interesting to see whether any of these registrants actually use their domains, or whether they’re mainly defensive registrations. I suspect the latter will be more often the case.
Currently in landrush, .luxury is due to go to general availability in about a month.
I believe their sunrise was priced lower than regular pricing in an effort to get brands on board, so I think your number is probably high.
I don’t think I’m allowed to give you the registry fees, but we sold .luxury sunrise requests at only € 119. And for those clients, the renewal fee will remain € 119.
I’m not sure actually where you’re seeing “retail price of over $1,000”. The prices during landrush and General Availability are for .luxury higher than during sunrise, but not tot much.
GA wholesale is $400. Given Bart’s comments I’d bet sunrise wholesale was around $100. So my guess is .luxury has taken in about $40k-$50k so far.
These are the prices from 101domains:
Sunrise $239
Pre-registration $780
Landrush $1149
Clearly I misread a registrar web page or two. I’ll add a clarification.