.Blog domains completed landrush on Wednesday and the registry announced the results and they don’t look too good.
The landrush resulted in 1000+ registered domains the 7 days of the landrush. Just 36 of these are going to auction at Sedo as more than one people made a landrush order for them.
The registrants paid about $200 retail price for each of these domains on top of the normal registration/renewal prices. The wholesale price of each landrush order was probably close to $150 to the registrars. So the .blog registry made more than $150,000 from the landrush phase. That doesn’t seem bad but the registry spent $19 million to get rights for the .blog new extension.
These numbers would be great for almost any other new extension by the .blog $19m price tag makes the numbers seem a bit weak.
These results shouldn’t come as a surprise as the prices for all good .blog domains were very expensive ranging from a few hundred dollars per year up to $125,000+ per year. Also many domains were not available as the registry reserved or registered some of the most searched for keywords on the internet.
.Blog released no 1, 2 or 3 character domain names. The total number of reserved 1, 2 and 3 character domains is 47,988.
There is not a lot of data since most registries are using the Early Access Program (EAP) model but .London which was also handled poorly during launch had a lot more than 36 domains in auction.
.NYC had over 1,000 domains going to auction and the registry reported all sales that can be found on Sold.Domains. The auctions had several 4 and 5 figure sales with marijuana.nyc selling for $60,920.
The domain name Marijuana.blog is now for sale for $14,000 per year at GoDaddy. Marijuana.nyc has a regular renewal price despite the high auction price.
General Availability for .blog domains begins November 21st.
The .blog registry is ‘Knock Knock, WHOIS There’ that is a subsidiary of Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com and Jetpack. It was created in 2015 to manage the launch and development of the .blog gTLD. The registry says it will have more than 250,000 registered .blog domains before the end of the year. This number seems impossible at this time.
The poor figures should surprise no-one.
Most people are not interested in paying much for a domain name, for a blog, even a commercial/sponsored blog.
Blogs are one area of the Internet where subdomains are still widely used. Most bloggers won’t even pay for a regular domain name.
This is one of the domain extensions people think will do really well, but in the long it will fizzle out. People start blogging, realize how painful it is, and stop. If you stop blogging will you keep your .BLOG domain? Nope!
There is no reason to setup a .BLOG website because that is not good for SEO. Better to use – blog.example.org or example.org/blog.
Timing for this .BLOG landrush could not have been worse. Competing for attention with the U.S. presidential election? An extra TLD to register couldn’t hold a candle to the conflagration.
Automattic wants to make money as it gives its WordPress for free. They haven’t thought out that plan well. As Kate said, bloggers won’t even pay for a regular domain, let alone an overpriced one.
Tech is going to find itself in trouble as the trend has changed. Globalization WILL slow down and than reverse. The trend of the future is LOCAL.
Inevitably,…all this MALINVESTMENT will have to be liquidated.
Its coming.
I give Trump 6 – 18 months in office before everyone wakes up and realizes …We are in deep deep deep trouble.
I remember quite some time ago my business partner and I looked up a few of the .blogs that were specific to my own web interests- but they took so long to come out I lost interest in putting them in my portfolio. Then when I saw your post last week about the landrush we revisited .blog and found it was pretty expensive. I think if you’re already a professional blogger (like you for instance Konstantinos) you already have social capital invested in the space you’ve already created. I wonder how they would reach 250,000 by the end of the year (!) We just subdomain with the keyword “blog” left of the dot of our business interests and have found it works just fine for our SEO and traffic.
bad marketing
The registry has some serious problems with the landrush. I registered one of the top keyword domains in the first day of the landrush (before this list was public) and all went well. I paid and received a receipt – and with a little luck there would be no other application to push the domain to the Sedo auction.
However now I noticed this excluded top keyword list and ‘my’ domain name is on it. When I submit the domain at get.blog it mentions it’s not free anymore. However it’s not mine yet – I have no final confirmation at this moment, and the registry is not responding to my mails.
I think I have a strong case since they showed the domain available in the landrush at the moment of registration and they accepted my order and money.
When did you make the order? Was it before Nov. 2nd or on the 2nd? Sorry to say but the registry was building its reserved list up to that day.
It was the 28th October.
That was before the landrush that started on Nov. 2nd. Registry probably used all these pre-orders to build its reserved list.
I understand your point. However it’s not transparant in any way since domain showed available for registration, €250 payment was accepted and confirmed (“Hooray! Your application is on its way!”)
And I think they know they’re wrong since I have not received an answer to my emails (but they do answer the emails from a friend of my regarding a different topic, so they are there somewhere… 😉
I don’t think you are getting the domain.
Philip, this is same as in NYC. Application doesn’t mean you get domain. It just means that you are on the list 🙂 , and that might change. .Blog seems to be handling it pretty badly. I guess 125k for everything is one way to really sell less then handful domains. To help adaption… lol
I think one of the main reasons .nyc is doing well, is registry didn’t try to reserve all the good to best domains and there weren’t crazy premiums. You can still get 3 letter .nyc for 20$, on .london would cost you pretty penny and on .blog its not even available. Hence a lot of businesses could actually go with great .nyc name, hence they are more inclined to adapt .nyc .
That is just bad conduct. To allow names to be registered and then use those names to build a reserve list is just ….. no words!
Yep, its messed up. But they spent 19mill, and they wont let anyone have a penny. And then people will not buy it, because it is too expensive , no good names, no one will build it out and momentum will be lost. Once momentum lost, much harder to build it out.
They do have marketing chops behind it, but they will need to drop price to get adaption up.
Momentum is key. If people see that most domains are not available or crazy expensive they will not come back. They will proceed to the next extension. And as this is going momentum will be lost on general availability.
who said .nyc is doing well, I don’t think they are, you guys are all bonkers.
This is where EXPERIENCE comes into play, ask any guy who owns a .com portfolio with blog domains.
All you get is guys who live in their moms basement making $100 offers on half decent names, now these punks want to charge thousands for annual renewals, domain business has simply gone crazy, who has this king of money to burn.
Next time someone inquiries about one of your domains, make sure you ask a crazy price, not $500, as if people are paying $3000 a year, well then they can pay $30,000 for a domain that costs $8 per year to renew.
Reality check people
In terms of development it is doing really well. In terms of domain sales it is doing ok. Depending on how you bench mark it. But i say it is doing well by development and adaption bench mark. If development there, sales will come later. Without development, there is no sales.
You have to be stupid to spend $19 millions for this useless TLD
Very few people start a blog with a view to making huge amounts of money. A very small number eventually make it to the big league but, by the time they have the cash, they’re unlikely to want to change their domain and risk their SEO and brand. This, like most new gTLDs, was poorly thought out.
GTLD = Good To Lose Dinero
Just bought 15 Blog domain names today!