8 November 2009
Against a backdrop of crippling restrictions, uncompetitive registration fees, lack of registrar take up, and registry apathy, .pro achieved an astonishing run of aftermarket sales in October 2009. All 10 sales reported exceeded $1,000, the average being $2,800.
Top of the shop was Game.pro at $5,000, followed by eBooks.pro at $4,500, the singular eBook.pro on $3,900, Link.pro $3,040, Arte.pro $3,000, Switch.pro $2,000, Moda.pro $2,000, Antique.pro and Antiques.pro at $1,600 apiece, with Reality.pro bringing up the rear at $1,118.
Switch.pro is already live, developed by Japanese lighting designer and engineer, Takeo Sugamata, he chose .pro because it was affordable, credible and brandable, adding "The meaning of our company name was to turn on a light or change something. We thought it sounded catchy."
.pro registrants will be hoping RegistryPro make changes when they renegotiate their contract with ICANN in early 2010. Founder of Total.pro, Andrew Campbell, is critical of the registry's failure to market .pro or ensure registrar take-up, "RegistryPro has failed .pro registrants for 5 years, only 10% of registrars by volume offer .pro, there are 40,000 .pro registrations versus a target of 1,000,000, registration fees are 200% higher than rival gTLD's, and the people who have the skill and vigour to develop .pro, web developers and entrepreneurs, are locked out by obsolete and uncommercial eligibility requirements. RegistryPro must negotiate a level playing field for .pro before ICANN floods the market with new unrestricted gTLD's."
© Total.pro 2009
3 May 2009
RegistryPro are running a Best of .Pro contest for .pro web sites in May to "highlight the rich content that has been developed since the TLD expanded eligibility in September 2008". The winner gets;
© Total.pro 2009
2 May 2009
SnapNames now offer a drop catching service for .pro domains. To use the service, log in to your SnapNames account, go to My Auctions, select Search for More Names, then Advanced Search. At first, you won't see .pro listed in the extensions available, click See More and .pro is revealed. Deselect .com, .net, and .org, select .pro, leave the search form blank and click Search. Snapnames will bring up all the .pro domains dropping soon. Click on Bidders twice to rank by existing bids to see the most popular drops.
You must bid a minimum of $59 to join an auction. When the .pro drops the auction is open for about 5 days, you will be emailed the closing time and date. Whoever places the initial $59 bid wins the auction if nobody else bids more. Bids within the last 5 minutes extend the auction by another 5 minutes so sniping isn't an option.
My bidding strategy is to bid with 6 minutes left, that way if the other bidders have forgotten about the closing time, they only get a couple of minutes to react to the outbid email SnapNames sends out. If somebody bids against me, I bid nearly my maximum bid with the full time extension left, that way if the other bidders edge up their bid gradually, they don't get the high bid early, and often drop out. If you keep extending the auction with 1 minute to go and the high bid switches between bidders, it gives both bidders the impression that one more bid might win the auction, people get bought into the idea of owning the domain if they are the high bidder with 1 minute to go, and that can lead to a bidding war.
Finally, as with any auction, decide on your maximum bid early and stick to it. Don't overbid for a domain somebody else didn't consider to be worth renewing. The point of SnapNames is to grab a bargain, expect to pay less than you would on a forum. The best time of year to catch a top .pro is mid-April, this is because most blockbuster .pro domains were registered on 2 March 2005 when Encirca launched their Pro Forwarding service and it takes 40-45 days for a .pro to drop after expiry.
© Total.pro 2009
13 April 2009
Daniel Parsons, President of SurplusEQ.com, a high tech asset recovery company in Phoenix, Arizona, has registered 1,118 .pro domains through DomainPeople. The domains are listed on DotProDomains.pro and parked at Sedo, the sample I checked were registered in early November 2008.
Several .pro registrants have 200-300 .pros but this collection is in a different ball park. If you type "Pro Domains" or "Pro Domain Names" in Google, DotProDomains.pro appears as a sponsored link, this is the first time I've seen somebody using Adwords to promote a .pro site.
© Total.pro 2009
10 April 2009
One of the things that first attracted me to.pro was the goodness of fit between the extension and a breadth of keywords. By fit, I mean strength of association or semantic logic. For example, if there was an extension .butter, Bread.butter would fit due to strength of association because bread and butter often appear together in a block of text. Conversely, Garlic.butter fits because of semantic logic, you can say the two words together in a sentence and it makes sense.
Fit is often mistaken for a domain hack but the two are completely different. For example, Rat.es is a hack, the two parts are meaningless individually but together form a word or phrase, in this case the word rates. In contrast, Rates.info, is a natural fit between the keyword and .info extension. People want rates info or information on rates, you get both strength of association and semantic logic fit.
For .com, fit doesn't matter. Blockbuster .coms can combine any keyword with the omnipotent .com brand. No distinction is drawn between keywords that fit and keywords that don't fit. Domainers analyse value in terms of search volume, click revenue, commercial value, popularity and type in traffic.
For alternative extensions, fit is critical. A quick survey of the highest selling domains across alternative extensions illustrates the point; Travel.info sold for $116,000 in July 2007, RingTones.mobi sold for $145,000 in October 2007, Fishing.net sold for $52,500 in January 2008, and University.org, sold for $100,000 in October 2006.
.pro takes fit to a new level. Firstly, you get forwards and backwards fit. For example, the domain Poker.pro, makes sense read as "Pro Poker" and "Poker Pro". You also get full and abbreviated fit. For example, Golf.pro, works as "Golf Pro" and Golf Professional". In comparison, "Net Fishing" makes no sense, neither does "Fishing Network", "Info Travel" and "Information Travel" have strength of association fit but no semantic logic, and RingTones.mobi only excels read backwards in full as "Mobile Ring Tone".
.tv fits media related keywords, .me fits verbs, .mobi fits mobile internet related keywords and other mobile services, .org fits not for profit keywords, and .info fits keywords people want information on. However, .pro fits a much wider range of keywords. There are 15,000 US trademarks with the word Pro in and they cover most sectors. .pro works particularly well with business, employment, sports, hobbies, skills, software, technology, services, and products but adds value to any keyword.
Tree.com, Tree.net, Tree.org, and Tree.info don't mean much from a business angle but add .pro and you're a tree surgeon. .pro tells people you are an expert in your field, that you provide a product or service that is a cut above the rest, it's a statement of intent that establishes trust and conveys credibility. In an increasingly congested domain extension market, .pro raises the bar.
© Total.pro 2009
5 April 2009
Arguably, the most beautiful and brandable gTLD, .pro has lived in the shadow of it's ugly sisters since its initial launch in June 2004. Excluding registry held .pros, there were just 1,296 .pros registered by February 2005.
On 2 March 2005, Encirca launched its $99 Pro Forwarding service which allowed people to lease .pro domains without having their professional credentials verified. In the first month, .pros registered through Encirca rose ninefold from 310 to 2,777. On 24 March 2005, ICANN wrote to RegistryPro, questioning whether the Pro Forwarding service "violated the spirit of .pro" and offered to amend the registry management contract to close the loop hole.
The loop hole wasn't closed and for the next 3 years Encirca collected $99 a year for most of the 6,500 .pros registered, with RegistryPro taking a 50% cut.
The arrangement between RegistryPro and Encirca achieved 3 things;
In May 2008, RegistryPro announced that ICANN had agreed to its expansion proposals, opening up .pro "to tens of millions of licensed and credentialed professionals and entities across the globe". Registrants would self-certify their professional credentials prior to registering a .pro, comply with a Terms of Use agreement, and subsequently provide their registrar with license details.
Since the official relaunch in September 2008, take-up has been sluggish, with total .pros registered rising from 10,000 to just 30,000 between August and December 2008. To put that into perspective, .asia received 266,000 applications in the first 24 hours of landrush in February 2008. We question why Asia Registry can sell 10 times more domains on the first day of landrush than RegistryPro can sell in 5 years and 2 landrushes.
One of the main reasons .pro has failed to gain traction is overpricing. Although, this has been partially addressed and reg fees have fallen from $99 to $30, .pro is still four times more expensive than other gTLD's. This price premium cannot be justified. .pro is a substitute product to .com, to persuade professionals to switch, pricing must be more competitive.
The counterargument is that $30 is a small cost to a business and that .pro is a gold standard and justifies a higher price. Businesses select domain extensions based on popularity, acceptance, and awareness. On that basis, .pro is an also ran. To gain popularity, acceptance, and awareness, a registry either has to spend tens of millions of dollars on advertising or rely on enthusiasts and part timers to develop sites to put the extension on the map. This type of user is extremely price sensitive, their sites either generate no income or a small amount of revenue from Adwords, and given the choice between a $30 .pro and a 99 cent .info, they will choose the .info.
Afilias, the .info registry, recognised this at the outset and cannily recruited an army of amateur developers and domainers to boost the extension's profile with 99 cent reg fees. Today .info has 5m registrations and is seen as a viable alternative to .com for information sites. Spain.info and Austria.info rank number 2 on Google for their respective keywords.
.pro is the one of the most restricted gTLD's and also one of the least well known. There are 2 problems with restrictions. Firstly, they significantly restrict your target market. In the case of .pro, web designers and developers are not licensed professionals with letters after their name so who is going to develop .pro?
Presumably, RegistryPro is counting on doctors, lawyers, engineers and accountants hiring somebody to do the work but invariably professionals work for an organisation and that entity already has a website, probably a .com or .org registered in the late 1990s.
That leaves a tiny pool of self-employed professionals who have heard of .pro, and are willing to switch to an impressive but lightly developed alternative extension.
The second problem with restrictions is they impose an administrative burden on registrars. Although .pro registrars don't have to verify license credentials upfront, they still have to collect the information retrospectively and audit 1% of .pro domains registered through them. Why would they agree to do that in low volumes when they can sell .com, .net, .org, .info and .biz in bigger volumes without the hassle?
One of the more notable achievements of the 2008 relaunch was signing up Network Solutions as a .pro registrar. NetSol bought with it 6.6% of the domain market and a business customer base unswayed by lower reg fees offered elsewhere. However, if you add the market share of other .pro registrars like DomainPeople, OVH, and Gandi, you still only get about 10% of the market. Therefore, RegistryPro is failing to sell to 90% of it's customer base.
If RegistryPro's marketing department was a teapot, it would be made out of chocolate. I'm sure somebody somewhere is doing something related to marketing but there is little evidence.
Between August 2004 and February 2008 there wasn't a single update on RegistryPro's In The News website page. News is so thin on the ground that last week RegistryPro issued a Press Release to say they had redesigned their website. What next, a Super Bowl slot to announce the coffee machine has been fixed? As John D Rockefeller said, "Don't blame the marketing department. The buck stops with the Chief Executive."
RegistryPro must cut .pro reg fees in line with other gTLD's, go back to ICANN and get the .pro licensing requirement removed, sign up volume registrars like Godaddy, eNom, and Tucows, and promote the extension directly to professionals.
For example, RegistryPro could give a free .pro to all newly qualified professionals and annual prizes for innovative .pro website design to encourage development. By focusing restrictions on professional use rather than licences, the burden of verification and auditing could be switched from registrar to registry, encouraging more registrars to offer .pro and expanding the pool of potential customers.
© Total.pro 2009