Thread: Has the .IN Promotion Gone On Too Long?

The reason for the promo is simple and has been a standard strategy for any emerging TLD namespace... If you can get people to register, you can convince many of them to renew... In order to get them registering names, make the financial barrier to entry trivially small.

Remember that there is absolutely no inherent "cost" associated with the creation of a domain name. For every name that is created, the probability of sustainable revenue increases proportionally, in terms of people electing to reup that name year after year.

The only .in names I own are .net.in and .org.in pure geos (good ones- all Indian cities with populations 1mm or higher) as well as some relevant .com's. Should my .in names ever undergo an exorbitant renewal price, I'd probably drop them, unless the aftermarket had caught up by that time and I could sell them to an interested party...

Look at what happened with the .im's. For the longest time, these names were $79.99 to register. Fantastic, category-killing one-worders were available, simply because the extension was very backwater and grotesquely epensive. A couple registrars dropped the registration fee to $4.99 (I think) for a period of time during the summer and the keyword gold rush was on (99.99% of these will never see any development- just interest amongst "domainers")... And what will happen when renewal comes around next year and the $79.99 bill is on the doorstep?

The large majority will drop, but they will have hooked just enough people in with words like horses.im or fans.im or hats.im to convince them to renew- and their promotion will have worked. Of course, IM will never amount to anything, but I believe .in will, so that's the critical difference. As long as renewal fees remain reasonable, I'm on board to speculate.

When the inboxes start getting full of spam from cheapo .in/co.in registrations as happened with .cn then you have a real credibility problem. China have acted but with a heavy fist, I don't see that happening with India and you can already see prices suffering, even top of the range premiums are hardly getting interest-sad!

When you think about it, it really won't matter whether the promo is a good idea or not-its not a good idea to hold bad .in domain names. .in is still a budding TLD and unless you play to develop, you're better off with strong keywords and names in short supply(e.g LLL.ins, one word .ins,geos,numbers etc.).$13 renewal fee is still steep, so it makes it more imperative you register solid names in the first place. I believe my confidence in .in is not unfounded, so i'll watch and see how things in this year.

Originally Posted by Dman

A couple registrars dropped the registration fee to $4.99 (I think) for a period of time during the summer and the keyword gold rush was on (99.99% of these will never see any development- just interest amongst "domainers")... And what will happen when renewal comes around next year and the $79.99 bill is on the doorstep?

You're right! I registered a couple of premium keyword .im's in July at $4.99 and resold them at $15 each. I think it's very difficult to profit from these kinds of domains in the long run.

Originally Posted by wot

When the inboxes start getting full of spam from cheapo .in/co.in registrations as happened with .cn then you have a real credibility problem. China have acted but with a heavy fist, I don't see that happening with India and you can already see prices suffering, even top of the range premiums are hardly getting interest-sad!

Totally agree with wot. There is a fine line between being affordable and cheap. Cheap domain registrations not only attract businesses trying to come online, domainers but also spammers. Once the reputation is dented it is very difficult to resurrect it back.

longer promotional causes lots of domain drops.

I still believe more promotion is needed, as
1>majority of people in india are still confused as if to register a .com vs .in, .net vs .in, .info vs .in and .co.in vs .in
2>as well as i see many good .in drops of SEO-rich search term based domains whose results come up for more than a billion in numbers and they could catch up on traffic easily if developed but domaining game rules dont care for SEO,
3>only fear is that .in should not be termed as a spammy cctld like .info which is also going around same promo prices now.

The difference in prices for new regs and renewal fees should be lesser. I believe people would be quite comfortable with new regs between $5 to $7 and renewals need to be brought to less than $10.

Hope someone at IN registry notices this