OnlineDomain.com Domain Name News & Opinions
Google won today the auction for the .APP extension. Google paid $25 million dollars for the right to sell the .APP new domains.
I wish Google good luck on getting their money back ($25,001,000 was the exact amount) from selling .app domain names only. Because that is not happening any time soon.
Google would either have to charge a large registration/renewal fee of $100 or more per year or come up with some other plan to make its money back. Because while there are a lot of apps in the market, very few of these are making any money, and thus they are not willing to pay a large fee for their domain name. Especially if they have an alternative for a $10 domain.
And I don’t see .app getting a ton of domain name registrations. People are registering cheap domains for their apps and if these don’t work out they abandon them and together they abandon their domain names. There are not domain names that people buy to keep for many years.
Of course Google may have some other plan for .app. Maybe Google will bundle it somehow with its “google apps” services. That would maybe add some value to its services but it will not make a lot of money for the extension.
The above are true if Google really wants to break even and eventually make a profit from .APP. Because Google has a lot of money to worry about things like that. It might be a prestige move or a marketing tool. Or Google just didn’t want to see .APP to the hands of a competitor like Amazon.
Google was up against 11 other bidders that all submitted a deposit so they could participate in the .app auction:
.APP REGISTRY INC.
Afilias Domains
Amazon EU S.à r.l.
dot App Limited
DotApp Inc.
Lone Maple, LLC
Merchant Law Group LLP
NU DOT CO LLC
Top Level Domain Holdings Limited
TRI Ventures, Inc.
Webera Inc.
From the auction results it seems that Google was willing to pay up to $30,400,000 for .app. And a lot of the bidders were willing to pay a lot of millions for .app.
10 of the bidders made a bid of $4M or more and 8 bidders made a bid of $8M or more. The losing bidder was willing to pay more than $24,3M but Google ultimately won the .app New gTLD. Was Amazon the second bidder? Maybe we will never know.
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Reminds me of .mobi.
“Good luck getting that money back”, I remember that’s what a lot of people said when Google bought YouTube for $1.65 Billion. Google won’t miss the money they spent on this, it’s about time they started throwing some money around in the new gtld auctions – lol.
This is not a GTLD play, it is more of a marketing play in regards to feeding their app store sales channel. $25M is well invested, it will help them get more commission revenue by giving them away to app developers who sell thru their store.
Yes it is probably a marketing play, while keeping a new player from entering the app business, but I am not sure how they will get more revenue.
Nope, I like it, and I’ve been waiting to buy a few for various purposes. One does not need a native app for it to be an app. It can be a mobile website, or other web-based application – of which there are many.
I didn’t say that there are not some good domains in there.
I said that it is not worth $25 million for the domain names only.
No domain name registry would pay such money. 5-10 million, yes. But 25M?
Google does not need to get back the 25 million (although they will). Some people buy car plate numbers for million of dollars just for the impression that they would get. Besides huge revenue, impression and also power to decide and control is what companies as huge as Google is looking at, 25M to them is a very small amount and they can afford to risk it, most of us can’t.
I have a feeling if it went to 40mil google would still get it. Its part of their strategy and Google has done many projects that were much worse and much bigger money losers then this. They are 200bill corporation. 25mil in their wheel house is not a lot of cash. With their money it is similar to defensive domain registration by an average person at a reg fee on go daddy.