.cars domains to start at $45,000, retail for $2,500
Cars Registry has set pricing for .car, .cars and .auto domains at crazy-high levels.
If you want to buy a domain in any of the three gTLDs on day one, it will cost you a whopping $45,000.
If you buy one during regular general availability, it’s likely to set you back $2,500.
The registry, a partnership of Uniregistry and XYZ.com, has set its registry fee at $2,000, according to an email sent to registrars this week.
That’s a buck higher than .sucks, one of the most expensive new gTLDs to launch to date.
The sunrise fee will be $3,000 — made up of the regular $2,000 fee plus an added $1,000. Again, that’s higher than .sucks.
The Early Access Period — which, as reported yesterday, has replaced the more usual landrush — will run for nine days with prices ranging from $45,000 to $5,000.
Compared to the usual models of XYZ.com and Uniregistry, which tend towards the mass-market, these prices are colossal.
I wonder how much the pricing was influenced by the fact that the registry has the car-related gTLD market almost entirely sewn up.
Its only potential competitor is .autos, which has been delegated for almost 18 months but has yet to even reveal its launch plans and probably isn’t going to be available to the mass market anyway.
Sunrise for all three gTLDS is due to start December 9, ending January 12. EAP will begin that day, and GA will start January 20.
Gtlds were supposed to open up availabilty for businesses since all good .com were taken, $8 .com is king, pay the premium for a .com
$8 renewals, you mean. Any good .com requires a high up-front investment to buy from who is holding it now.
Crazy high prices. No risk of abuse or speculators sucking everything up though.
@ BT, you’re half right. This time around it’s the registry itself that is effectively sucking everything up. This is what can happen when the foxes are put in charge of the henhouse, or as ICANN calls it: “vertical integration”! Blame ICANN for this mess.
@BY @Bill Sweetman The only market for these are automakers that could use them as branded domains. There is no general market for these which is why prices are so high.
Right, automakers who already own really desirable .com’s, so what’s the point?
Some of them don’t, for example nissan.com is not owned by nissan auto
Whatever, if they are releasing the extension for themselves then they better realize that not too many people will invest in it. I think they know that though and don’t care.
However I hate premium registry fees, I try not to invest in it but even .live, I got 1 domain @ reg fee and that was a variant of a word, everything that was worth while had a premium reg fee attached to it, $800 renewal fees even $60,000 fees.
Don’t get me wrong, all these new gtld are great, but I will invest in those at reg fee, $20 or less, maximum, the cheaper the better. Because really at the end of the day a premium name that you can sell for say x,xxx once is still better than a yearly fee of xxx or more.
At least you can setup a car club for under 10 bucks with .CLUB 🙂
Three very expensive name endings (not disclosable in this forum). The kind of $ numbers which would make a billion dollar company catch their breath. ICANN rules make it simple for a registry to drop prices but difficult to raise them. I’d think of the dot .car .cars .auto launch as a multi year EAP where everything costs $2000 but nearly ‘everything’ is un-reserved. You could register anything for $2000 (single letters, 2 letters, numbers, dictionary words). Speaking as a registry operator, launching a new GTLD does not come with a user manual. CCA registry is learning from the mistakes of others to price premium names in an acceptable manner. As a domainer I would not speculate in Car/Cars/Auto strings unless I saw an arbitrage opportunity between the $2000 wholesale price and the the potential secondary market resale of any given name. .Car .Cars and .Auto will be very hands-off and .com centric, aside from the retail price-point which is significantly higher than .com