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This is mathematically simple to fix. Charge US$0.50 per month ($6 per year) for every domain reservation regardless of who is reserving. The fee must be char

This is mathematically simple to fix. Charge US$0.50 per month ($6 per year) for every domain reservation regardless of who is reserving. The fee must be charged per month and not per year, which intentionally results in greater maintenance overhead. I don't care if you are a registrar, government, charity, school, or whatever. US$0.50 each and every month for each and every name. Registrars can slap whatever markup they want on top of that. The free market will lower the price where competition matters and raise the price where demand is huge for a specified name. If you are holding 100,000 domain names and doing nothing but serving ads on them you better hope you are generating greater than $800,000 (conservative estimate) in advertising revenue off those domains. That number is the cost of reserving the name plus your business expenses to maintain those names and the associated advertising content. I find this scenario to not likely to be profitable. Unfortunately this solution won't work in reality, because everybody will bitch about their business interests and self-justifying political reasons.

dtech 8y ago
most registrars already charge a yearly fee per domain. Does ICANN not already charge a fee per domain?
- austincheney 8y ago
  ICANN charges a ridiculously low maintenance fee to the registrars at something like $0.18 per domain per year. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-ab&q=icann+domain+fee https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-ab&q=icann+...
dorgo 8y ago
Advertisers often pay 3€ - 5€ to google for one click. If your 100,000 domains are not complete garbage, you should easily get a million out of it.
- Double_a_92 8y ago
  > 3€ - 5€ Isn't that for 1000 clicks?
  - isostatic 8y ago
    Apparently not https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2015/07/06/average-cost-per-click https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2015/07/06/average-cost-p... > Below are the 97 countries represented in the map, in order of highest average cost per click to lowest average cost per click, compared to the US average CPC, which is between $1 and $2 on the Search network.
    - Double_a_92 8y ago
      Now I'm unsure if each individual click is actually billed for that much. Or if that's a sum / average of all the advertising costs until someone finally clicks.
      - dorgo 8y ago
        It is what Google gets when somebody/something clicks on an ad in SERPs.
  - C1sc0cat 8y ago
    No for example in the drink space in which I work the CPC for popular cocktail terms can easily be in the 1-2$ range eg Negroni Recipe is $2.4 in the US
- austincheney 8y ago
  That is not really accurate. I used to work with this madness. Google ad displays/impressions are the result of transactional data micro-auctions. If there is high demand for a particular and well known data market, like Las Vegas hotel booking, the ad rate will be more. The auction rate is determined by the winning bid rate of the competing content providers. In the Las Vegas hotel booking example the hotel properties might pay up to $16 for their ad display along side Google search results and up to $24 for a click through. Most ads, though, are rated at pennies. Anything that can achieve bid rates over $0.50 is a gold mine. So, yes, some providers will pay far more than $7.00 for a click, but that is extraordinarily rare. This is even more rare when source and context are taken into account. Impressions that look organic, like on top of search results, are worth more than those that look like spam. I highly doubt ads that look like spam on a parked domain are doing more than pennies, likely fractions of a penny. The commonality of low rates and weak impressions on online advertising is also why Facebook shares aren't worth more than they are given the traffic and dedicated eyeballs that they have.
- jmngomes 8y ago
  In some industries, you may get those levels of CPC on a high value web property, but a parked/error/empty domain will not be valued by a reputed ad network in the same way as an Alexa Top 10000 website would, the CPC/CPM will not even be close.
collyw 8y ago
Why wouldn't the monthly renewal be automated away?
- austincheney 8y ago
  There is liability in frequency of transactions that requires human monitoring. The more frequent a transaction is the more liability there is. If the charges were automated would you risk the presence, trademark, and health of your business that your domain will always be there due to that automation?
  - vageli 8y ago
    > There is liability in frequency of transactions that requires human monitoring. The more frequent a transaction is the more liability there is. If the charges were automated would you risk the presence, trademark, and health of your business that your domain will always be there due to that automation? I don't understand..large companies currently outsource domain management to others, effectively relying on automation for their business. Same goes for any business that pays any bill with automation. Do you also cut a check monthly for phone and internet service?
    - austincheney 8y ago
      Bills and accounting at any large company are managed by a team of accountants with the support of automation. The difference is that utilities do not expire. If you don’t pay your bills you may lose service temporarily, but they won’t delete your account and reprocess your facility. A domain name is essentially leased property. If you let it expire not only will you lose it but then somebody else can take it and you won’t get it back. The real world equivalent is failing to pay mortgage or property taxes on your house, except consumer protection laws require a large number of failures (sometimes years without payment) before they can take ownership.
richardwhiuk 8y ago
All you've done is increase the registration fee by $6 per year as the registrar will happily handle the monthly aspect. The money will just increase the profit of the rent seekers who control DNS.
- pas 8y ago
  not necessarily, if it reduces the number of squatted domains.
- bo1024 8y ago
  I don't know, it might work. For me as an individual, my costs go up $6 per year. For a domain squatter, their costs go up hundreds of thousands. It makes sense to me, like a property tax. You are basically renting a valuable natural resource from everybody else, so you pay a little bit to repay them and prove you're getting some use out of it.
belorn 8y ago
The benefit of increasing the registration fees is actually an concept that the Swedish registry is currently following. They found that by increasing prices the new registrations did not suffer, and the renewal actually increased, with the theory being that because people pay more they value the domain name ownership more. A cheap registration price make sense when you look to expand new registrations to a fresh market, but what most parties in this industry want now is a higher rate of renewals. For that a higher price can actually be beneficial for both registries and registers.

dtech 8y ago

most registrars already charge a yearly fee per domain. Does ICANN not already charge a fee per domain?

austincheney 8y ago
ICANN charges a ridiculously low maintenance fee to the registrars at something like $0.18 per domain per year. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-ab&q=icann+domain+fee https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-ab&q=icann+...

dorgo 8y ago

Advertisers often pay 3€ - 5€ to google for one click. If your 100,000 domains are not complete garbage, you should easily get a million out of it.

Double_a_92 8y ago
> 3€ - 5€ Isn't that for 1000 clicks?
- isostatic 8y ago
  Apparently not https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2015/07/06/average-cost-per-click https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2015/07/06/average-cost-p... > Below are the 97 countries represented in the map, in order of highest average cost per click to lowest average cost per click, compared to the US average CPC, which is between $1 and $2 on the Search network.
  - Double_a_92 8y ago
    Now I'm unsure if each individual click is actually billed for that much. Or if that's a sum / average of all the advertising costs until someone finally clicks.
    - dorgo 8y ago
      It is what Google gets when somebody/something clicks on an ad in SERPs.
- C1sc0cat 8y ago
  No for example in the drink space in which I work the CPC for popular cocktail terms can easily be in the 1-2$ range eg Negroni Recipe is $2.4 in the US
austincheney 8y ago
That is not really accurate. I used to work with this madness. Google ad displays/impressions are the result of transactional data micro-auctions. If there is high demand for a particular and well known data market, like Las Vegas hotel booking, the ad rate will be more. The auction rate is determined by the winning bid rate of the competing content providers. In the Las Vegas hotel booking example the hotel properties might pay up to $16 for their ad display along side Google search results and up to $24 for a click through. Most ads, though, are rated at pennies. Anything that can achieve bid rates over $0.50 is a gold mine. So, yes, some providers will pay far more than $7.00 for a click, but that is extraordinarily rare. This is even more rare when source and context are taken into account. Impressions that look organic, like on top of search results, are worth more than those that look like spam. I highly doubt ads that look like spam on a parked domain are doing more than pennies, likely fractions of a penny. The commonality of low rates and weak impressions on online advertising is also why Facebook shares aren't worth more than they are given the traffic and dedicated eyeballs that they have.
jmngomes 8y ago
In some industries, you may get those levels of CPC on a high value web property, but a parked/error/empty domain will not be valued by a reputed ad network in the same way as an Alexa Top 10000 website would, the CPC/CPM will not even be close.

collyw 8y ago

Why wouldn't the monthly renewal be automated away?

austincheney 8y ago
There is liability in frequency of transactions that requires human monitoring. The more frequent a transaction is the more liability there is. If the charges were automated would you risk the presence, trademark, and health of your business that your domain will always be there due to that automation?
- vageli 8y ago
  > There is liability in frequency of transactions that requires human monitoring. The more frequent a transaction is the more liability there is. If the charges were automated would you risk the presence, trademark, and health of your business that your domain will always be there due to that automation? I don't understand..large companies currently outsource domain management to others, effectively relying on automation for their business. Same goes for any business that pays any bill with automation. Do you also cut a check monthly for phone and internet service?
  - austincheney 8y ago
    Bills and accounting at any large company are managed by a team of accountants with the support of automation. The difference is that utilities do not expire. If you don’t pay your bills you may lose service temporarily, but they won’t delete your account and reprocess your facility. A domain name is essentially leased property. If you let it expire not only will you lose it but then somebody else can take it and you won’t get it back. The real world equivalent is failing to pay mortgage or property taxes on your house, except consumer protection laws require a large number of failures (sometimes years without payment) before they can take ownership.

richardwhiuk 8y ago

All you've done is increase the registration fee by $6 per year as the registrar will happily handle the monthly aspect. The money will just increase the profit of the rent seekers who control DNS.

pas 8y ago
not necessarily, if it reduces the number of squatted domains.
bo1024 8y ago
I don't know, it might work. For me as an individual, my costs go up $6 per year. For a domain squatter, their costs go up hundreds of thousands. It makes sense to me, like a property tax. You are basically renting a valuable natural resource from everybody else, so you pay a little bit to repay them and prove you're getting some use out of it.

belorn 8y ago

The benefit of increasing the registration fees is actually an concept that the Swedish registry is currently following. They found that by increasing prices the new registrations did not suffer, and the renewal actually increased, with the theory being that because people pay more they value the domain name ownership more. A cheap registration price make sense when you look to expand new registrations to a fresh market, but what most parties in this industry want now is a higher rate of renewals. For that a higher price can actually be beneficial for both registries and registers.