Want to sell your fresh TLD through Go Daddy? KISS.
A uniform registration process is key to selling your fresh TLD through Go Daddy.
The prior week representatives of regarding 800 of the unique strings applied for as fresh top level domains gathered in Phoenix for Go Daddy Registry Days.
The event was designed to start a dialogue between the world’s largest domain name registrar and the many registries that hope to get shelf space at GoDaddy.com for their fresh TLDs.
At a high level, the message was pretty basic: KISS, or Keep It Simple, Stupid.
With hundreds of fresh TLDs competing for shelf space, it’s notable to make your registration process similar to those of existing TLDs that have a simple process.
Go Daddy CFO Mike Zimmerman specifically pointed to Public Interest Registry’s .org as a good registration implementation model to follow. (Afilias provides registry services for .org.)
From a pricing standpoint, Zimmerman suggested started at the retail price and then working back to what the wholesale price will be, and to price in U.S. dollars. He also warned in general against very high price points.
Also, he suggested not trying to get cute with pricing, such as demand or event driven price changes. Save your creativity for marketing programs.
When it comes to finances, Go Daddy is shaking things up a bit.
The old model is that a registrar pre-pays the registry for future registrations with a deposit. Furthermore, when a domain expires the registry automatically charges the renewal fee and then refunds it if the registrant doesn’t end up renewing the domain through the deletion cycle.
Go Daddy is asking registries to bill it net 60, meaning that registries will be paid approximately two months following the end of the month in which a registration occurs. It also asks that it get billed for renewals at the end of the 45 day grace period instead of upon registration.
Post-pay probably makes a lot more sense than pre-pay, but I’m curious what payment relationships fresh TLD hopefuls have with their back end technical registry providers. (In other words, will they have to pay per-domain fees to their technical back end provider ahead of they get paid by Go Daddy?) I also imagine fresh TLD firms will want to only offer a post pay model to credit worthy registrars.
Go Daddy CEO Blake Irving told me that he’d ideally like to carry every fresh TLD. That will obviously create a search and discovery challenge — more on that later.
