Fact Check: UK Registrar World’s Largest Fresh Domain Name Supplier?
Reviewing the numbers behind DomainMonster’s claim.
Yesterday domain name registrar DomainMonster.com sent out a press release “UK Firm Confirmed as World’s Largest Fresh Domain Name Supplier“. As stated by the release,
Measured by the largest number of domains registered in the first month of public door opening at a domain registry, the closest retail competitor was US based Go-Daddy, some 36% behind Domainmonster.com.
It may come as a surprise that a relatively unknown domain name registrar topped Go Daddy by such a sizable margin. I think we ought to run this one through analysis like those political fact-checking sites.
There have basically been two gTLD launches in the past two years: .asia and .tel. The first gotcha is that Go Daddy doesn’t offer .tel domain names, so that gives DomainMonster a leg up to begin with. The second is that the data is limited to just one month following the launch of the fresh domains.
I can’t get my numbers to match up with the firm’s 36% lead over Go Daddy, but looking into the numbers shows that the stat is misleading.
First for .Tel. As I stated, Go Daddy doesn’t offer .tel, so it’s number is 0. I’m not sure which month DomainMonster used for its .tel data. But in April 2009, which I believe is the first month following general availability of .tel, its parent firm Mesh Digital registered 3,675 .tel domain names. In March they registered 10,938. (I’m assuming the firm only has one accredited registrar.)
For the other gTLD launch, .asia, Go Daddy outsold DomainMonster 2 or 3x each month around the launch. In April 2008, Go Daddy sold 10,728 .asia domain names through GoDaddy.com and its reseller program, compared to 4,051 for DomainMonster. March and May numbers have a similar ratio between the two firms.
If you look at how many .asia domains the firms sold during the first calendar year, Go Daddy outsold Domain Monster 3-to-1.
So from a fact-check standpoint, the press release lands somewhere in the middle: technically true, but misleading.
That’s not to say DomainMonster.com is a bad firm. On the contrary, they have done a great job teaming up with registries as they launch fresh TLDs. You may have seen their booth at one of the many domain conferences.
But if you want to know which firm will sell more of a fresh TLD head-to-head, put your money on those guys in Scottsdale.
