.CLUB revenue reportedly $7.2 million
.CLUB Domains had $7.2 million of revenue in 2017.
That’s according to Inc magazine, which ranked the company at 1164th in its 2018 Inc 5000 list of the fastest-growing US-based companies.
Growth over three years for .CLUB, which is listed as having 17 employees, was 419%, according to the profile.
.club is one of the best-performing new gTLDs in terms of volume, with over 1.3 million domains under management, according to the company.
While it has generally steered away from deep discounting, it has in recent weeks benefited from a huge increase in sales — adding over 100,000 names to its zone file in just a few days earlier this month — as a result of a sale at the Chinese registrar Alibaba, which sold .club names for the RNB equivalent of $0.44.
That had the effect of diverting .club from a decline that looked like it would shortly have seen it dip below one million zone names for the first time in over a year.
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.Club has been 99 cents everywhere I have looked for at least the last year.
.Club has had three big spikes this year, they are desperate to make it look like it is still growing. It is a “vicious circle” as they’ll now need to do it over again next year when all those names drop.
I have seen comments from people with .CLUB in the past attacking the business models of other registries like .XYZ for their deeply discounted registrations.
Now they are going down the same path. I guess when limited people want your product, all you can do is lower the price to offset huge registration losses.
What do a bunch of worthless registrations add to a registry? Not much. All it does is inflate registration numbers and there are more to drop later.
Brad
I can only assume that they hope to ride it out and that real growth will one day return.
I don’t think it is going to work out that way and .club is going to end up one of those extensions that ends up losing 50% of its registrations down the line. There will come a point where the padding isn’t worth doing any more.
.Club guys are going at it right, they do a great job marketing their string and they’re incredibly active in the industry. The management team has a track record of success and they’re All In. This team deserves to and should make it. Our industry needs more people like them.
The problem with the China discounting strategy is that it eventually turns a gTLD into a gTLD with Chinese market dynamics. The renewal rates drop because it is cheaper for a registrant to register a new domain name rather than paying for the full registration fee to renew the domain name. Many of these discounted domain names will not be developed into working websites and will be used for affiliate landers. The .CLUB still has a relatively diverse registrant base. There is a tipping point where discounting forces the gTLD into a boom and bust cycle with spikes of new discounted new registrations and low registration numbers between them.
Eventually renewal time catches up with these discounted registrations and most of them drop. Some new gTLDs are in a far worse state than .CLUB when it comes to this boom and bust cycle. Going below 1M registrations would have been damaging for .CLUB so the use of discounting to drive registration volume is understandable.