Rightside offers $10 renewals on premium names

Rightside is to run a promotion that will discount renewals on premium names down to .com prices.
From May 16 to June 30, if you buy any of the domains that Rightside has marked as premium — except the super-premium “Platinum” names — the wholesale renewal fee will be just $10.
Registrars will mark this up according to their own pricing models.
Normally, the price you pay at the checkout is the price you pay every year after that.
The deal is overtly targeted at domainers.
Rightside said: “At these reduced prices, you’ll have more time to find the right buyer for any domains you register, and incur lower fees to transfer to them once you do. If you’re looking to add high-quality domains to your portfolio, this will be the time to do it.”
The reduced renewals only apply to names registered during the six-week window, but they do pass on to subsequent registrants if the domain is sold.
Rightside is calling it a “first-of-its-kind” promo, but in reality it’s just a temporary regression to the once-standard industry model.
Remember, prior to the 2012-round gTLDs, only exceptions like .tv charged premium rates for renewals.
Premium renewals are now very commonplace, but are by no means the rule, in the new gTLD industry.
For Rightside, the offer means the company may experience a brief cash windfall as domainers, who generally hate premium renewals, take a chance on the registry’s names.
There’s also a potential marketing benefit to be gained from having more domainers on board as unpaid salespeople.
But it does rather suggest the premiums are not flying off the shelves at the rate Rightside wants.
The company recently disclosed that in the first few months of the year it made revenue of $674,610 selling 1,820 premium names, leading to an average price of $372. Twelve five-figure names had been sold.
Over its portfolio of 39 gTLDs, Rightside has flagged over 964,000 as premium, or about 25,000 per TLD.

.guru renewals at 63%

Ten days into its series of renewal rate disclosures, Donuts has revealed that .guru’s rate currently stands at 63.4%.
In a blog post yesterday, COO Richard Tindal said that the registry’s overall renewal figure for the first 81,569 domains it sold was 68.4%.
The other two large TLDs in the batch — .photography and .clothing — came in at 75.7% and 74.0%, respectively.
.guru was the first new gTLD to launch in English that did not refer to a specific niche vertical. As such, it took the lion’s share of the early new gTLD speculation money.
We’re looking at a typical junk drop, in other words.
Over 10,000 names have been deleted from the .guru zone file since it peaked at over 80,000 names on February 28, as this DI PRO chart shows.

Tindal wrote that he expects the numbers to improve over time:

In March and April we expect the cumulative rate on all Donuts names to stabilize around 70%, and then trend upwards toward 80% as the average age of registrations increases and the proportion of names with website content continues to grow.

ICANN 50% renewal predictions not based on registry data

ICANN’s projection that new gTLDs will see renewals of between 25% and 50% is not based on empirical data from new gTLD registries.
The predictions, which come in under industry standard expectations, are “conservative and somewhat subjective”, ICANN said.
The organization last week revealed that its 2016 budget is partly based on a high estimate of 50% renewals, with 25% for registries that gave their domains away for free.
Because ICANN would have been in possession of actual registry transaction reports for February at the time of publication, I wondered whether the 50% number was anchored in early new gTLD registries’ actual experience.
Transaction reports give the actual number of renewals each registry gets in any given month.
But ICANN told DI today that its 2016 budget was “produced in November 2014 and reviewed in January 2015 by the GDD Domain Name Services team.”
An ICANN spokesperson said:

These projections are strictly for revenue planning, so they are rather conservative and somewhat subjective. We have limited historical data to refer to when examining new gTLD domain name renewals; these are uncharted waters.
…
As renewals occur, we will be in a better position to refine our assumptions when and if the actual data varies widely from what we have assumed in our model.

Donuts’ current renewal number, revealed as part of a blog series, is 71%. It has not yet stabilized.

All eyes on Donuts as first new gTLD renewal figures roll in

Donuts is about to give the world the clearest picture yet of the ongoing demand for new gTLD domain names.
The company has taken the unprecedented decision to disclose its renewal figures on a pretty much live basis.
COO Richard Tindal has been blogging renewal stats for .bike, .clothing, .guru, .ventures, .holdings, .plumbing and .singles for the last few days.
Those were the first seven of its gTLDs to hit general availability.
To Saturday, the renewal status of 6,352 names in these gTLDs was known and the renewal rate was 85.3%.
However, that rate is boosted by the relatively high proportion of the names that were registered during sunrise periods.
Donuts said that “two thirds” of the 6,352 reported domains were registered after sunrise.
That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, given that Donuts has previously put the total number of sunrise regs across the seven TLDs at just 1,404, which would work out at about 22%, not 33%.
On Friday, the company had said that the status of 4,534 names was known and the renewal rate was 91.6%.
If you deduct the Friday numbers from the Saturday numbers, you get to 1,265 renewals and 553 drops, a renewal rate of almost 69.6% for that particular day.
That number, which is a few percentage points off what a gTLD such as .com regularly reports, could of course fluctuate.
The full-year renewal rate, which would factor out much of the domainer activity, of course won’t be known for another year.
Donuts said it expects its renewal rate to drop to the mid-70s in its next daily report, expected today, which will cover an additional 22,910 domains.
The company’s decision to blog its numbers comes a day or two after we reported that ICANN is only budgeting for renewals of 50%.
The 14.6% of names not renewed works out to about 933 domains.
“We believe most of those names will be re-registered by another party within the next 35 days,” Tindal wrote.
As they were all registered in the early days of GA, one might expect them to be of a reasonably high quality.
While GA began at the end of January 2014, renewal rates are not known until the Auto-Renew Grace Period, which can be as long as 45 days, has expired.

New gTLDs bring back tiered renewal pricing

Only one mass-market TLD used it, and it’s often considered a bad idea, but variable pricing for domain name renewals is making a comeback with the launch of new gTLDs.
What Box? and Plan Bee are the first two new gTLD registries to start selling domains with tiered renewal fees, in .menu and .build respectively, via Go Daddy.
If you pay Go Daddy $189.99 for a “Priority Rre-registration” in .build, your annual renewal fee if you secure the name will be be $149.99, instead of the $99.99 other pre-registrants will pay.
Similarly, a Priority Pre-registration in .menu will set you back $199.99 a year, forever, instead of $49.99.
I understand that the standard Go Daddy initial registration fee for these two TLDs during general availability will also be $99.99 and $49.99 respectively.
The other two new gTLDs with announced pricing, .uno and .luxury, do not appear to be charging tiered rates.
Go Daddy confirmed that the renewal pricing will be permanently higher in the .build and .menu, telling us:

The industry is starting to move toward a tiered pricing system. As such, some registries have elected to make renewals higher on domain names captured during the priority pre-registration period.

It’s actually permitted under ICANN’s standard Registry Agreement.
Generally, the RA prevents registries charging variable renewal fees. If you find yourself running a successful business in a new gTLD, the registry is not allowed to gouge you for higher renewals.
There’s a provision in section 2.10 of the contract that is designed to “prohibit abusive and/or discriminatory Renewal Pricing practices imposed by Registry Operator”.
But the rule does not apply if you’re told at the point of registration that your renewal pricing will be higher.
The contract states that “Registry Operator must have uniform pricing for renewals of domain name registrations”, but grants this huge exception:

if the registrar has provided Registry Operator with documentation that demonstrates that the applicable registrant expressly agreed in its registration agreement with registrar to higher Renewal Pricing at the time of the initial registration of the domain name following clear and conspicuous disclosure of such Renewal Pricing to such registrant

The only major TLD to try variable pricing before now was .tv, which Verisign currently operates.
The .tv registry held back thousands of desirable strings when it launched in 2000. Instead of auctioning them, it priced these names to sell, but with renewal prices matching the initial registration fee.
If you bought a premium .tv name 10 years ago for $10,000, you’ve been paying $10,000 a year ever since.
This proved very unpopular — especially with domain investors, who continue to moan about the high carrying cost of .tv names bought years ago — and Verisign scrapped the policy on new registrations in 2010.
Some say tiered renewal pricing is the main reason .tv isn’t nearly as popular as it arguably should be.
But will it work in 2014?
Tiered renewal fees seems like an excellent way to discourage domainers from participating in your launch.
Would you be willing to pay higher renewal fees ad infinitum just for the chance for first dibs on the new gTLD domain name you want?

One in five .рф domains have web sites

The .рф registry celebrated its first launch anniversary last week, with almost one million .рф names registered and apparently almost one in five domains with an active web site.
According to RU-Center, which says it is the registrar of record for 40% of .рф (.rf) names, about 18% of the Cyrillic domains registered in the last year resolve to full web sites.
The registrar said in a press release:

18% of names have website, 16% do redirect, 4% are on parking, 15% are just delegated but not available, and 15% have a plug webpage. 29% of .RF names are unused.

That compares to the 18.7% use penetration of .info, which has been around for over a decade, assuming RU-Center and Afilias compiled their numbers using a similar methodology.
RU-Center also said that 94% of .рф sunrise registrations have been renewed. The rate of landrush registration renewals, which give an indication of what speculators think of the space, will not be clear until December, it said.
It is apparently now also possible for non-Russians to obtain .рф domains.