Prices on 1.1 million premium domains — Donuts slashing
850,000 domains will be dropped to standard prices as part of repricing.
Fresh top level domain name firm Donuts is cutting prices on 1.1 million premium-priced domains, counting moving 850,000 domains from premium tiers to regular prices. I believe this represents regarding half of Donuts’ premium inventory.
The firm operates 242 top level domain names. The price drops will cover 45 of these top level domains.
A review of the impacted domains shows that many of them are from the Rightside portfolio of domain names that Donuts purchased. Rightside priced many more domains per TLD as premium compared to Donuts. Rightside was part of Demand Media when it applied for top level domains and used Demand Media’s data-driven approach to identify premium domains.
Rightside went way overboard. This became very apparent when fresh TLDs launched without as much fanfare as applicants expected.
The premium prices will drop on November 5. Starting September 5, anyone can register the domains that will drop in price and get the lower renewal price but still pay the higher premium price upon registration. It’s sort of a like a mini-Dutch auction; parties can pay a bit more to get the domains now rather than compete with people starting November 5.
Some registrars are expected to hold pre-order events for the domains that will reduce on November 5.
Donuts has a special page that lists all of the domains that will be reduced and the percentage change in wholesale price.
