Subscribe
ICANN Lowering Fees
Submit to Digg.com!
June 26th, 2007 by 
Jay Westerdal
ICANN just announced to Registrars in San Juan about 5 minutes ago that they will be lowering their fees to $0.20 cents per domain starting July 1st. The preliminary budget will be posted later this week, but here’s the scoop. The current rate is $0.22 cents and the previous year it was $0.25. The delay from when a registrant actually sees this fee being lowered can lag a lot. Once the budget is officially approved, the Registrars can bank on the lower fees and start charging it to their customers accordingly. The Finance committee has approved the fee reduction so it is more official than not. Kurt Pritz, Senior Vice President of ICANN, has said that once the finance committee makes its recommendation it does not need board approval for the fee, however the overall budget still must be officially voted on and pass. But at this time we are expecting the budget to be voted on and also to pass. Earlier this year we saw GoDaddy refund $0.03 on all domains that were registered during the previous cycle because they were invoiced a few months after the change.
Verisign will be raising its fees on October 15th so the lowest cost for a domain registration will be at a two year low starting July 1st and will last until the domain costs raise by the registries on October 15th. Frank Schilling and other domainers have been saying that people should renew their domains early and lock in a few extra years of registration. I think this window is a perfect time to take that advice.
« Newer Post Older Post »
Posted in ICANN |
7 Comments »
June 26th, 2007 at 9:37 am
likewise, eNom refunded a few pennies per dom. in May
June 30th, 2007 at 11:50 pm
Jay,
This is totally unrelated to your current blog but I didn’t know how else to reach you. I was doing a little research and noticed that the domain HomeLoans.com
was owned by Wells Fargo, yet the domain doesn’t resolve. I even checked archive.org
and it looks like there hasn’t been an active web page on that domain since 2001. I get really annoyed when great domains are wasted by big companies and I wrote a little commentary on Frank’s blog about this. With the tools and technology that you guys have over there at Name Intelligence, I was hoping you could elaborate more on other generic domains owned by big companies – that don’t resolve. I think it would make a great post for you blog! Here is a little comment I made on Frank Schilling’s blog on this issue:
“I don’t know why, but I have a pet peeve with large companies that hold these beautiful generic domains in their portfolio, yet they do nothing with it. For example, take a look at HomeLoans.com
, owned by Wells Fargo. According to Compete.com
, that domain gets almost 400 unique visitors a day, yet for some reason they rather let that name site idle than forward it to their web page regarding mortgage loans. I just don’t get it!
Imagine how much revenue they are leaving on the table probably because of the lack of knowledge regarding the power this generic domain holds. If they forwarded this domain to their mortgage page (like Bank of American did with their domain loans.com
) and assuming that this name gets 12,000 type-ins a month, with a conservative 1% conversion rate (people using Wells Fargo for their home loan), with revenues of $4000 per loan (very realistic in this industry) – we are talking potential revenues of $480,000 a month or $5,760,000 annually!
Yet for some reason Richard Kovacevich (the recently departed CEO of Wells Fargo) or any other high ranking management personnel for that matter, fail to realize that they can probably add $5 million dollars in annual revenue by simply instructing some systems administrator to take 2 minutes out of his/her time to forward the domain to their mortgage home page. 2 minutes of work = $5 million in revenues – what a concept….if only they knew.
Wells Fargo is not the only one missing the boat – Fidelity owns Retire.com
….but instead of it being forwarded to their 401K home page….this domain is being wasted into internet obscurity. I’m sure there’s huge list of similar big name companies under-utilizing their generic domains for what seems like no good reason at all.
It’s still baffles me that it’s almost 2008 and these companies don’t get it…..this truly signifies that it’s still really early in the domain game, don’t you think?”
Keep up the great work! I really enjoy your insightful commentary on you blog. You and Frank Schilling are doing a lot to educate the masses in regards to world of domains in general, and I truly appreciate it.
Regards,
Gabe