ICANN New gTLD Question: How much will a new TLD cost?

Columbia Business School Center on Global Brand Leadership. Who should invest in a dot Brand. ICANN new gTLD question: How much will a new TLD cost?

I want to touch on the price of a new gTLD (new TLD cost). I know there are some unknowns and it depends partly on what you do with your top level domain.

I think it depends a lot on the size of the TLD and the amount of activity in it. Year one you have a $185,000 application fee will be a much bigger year for most dot brand TLDs as most will not have 50,000 or 100,000 second level domains. On an ongoing basis I think you are looking at the ICANN cost of $25,000 which is a fixed number. 25 cents a name, and external operating fees from a registry services provider that will probably be less than $100,000 a year depending on the size of the new TLD, and then you have your internal costs of operation of the new gTLD. So I think you are going to be able to run the whole thing on an annual basis on a quarter of a million dollars. And while that is a pretty big number in the context of a legal budget, in the marketing budget particularly for the fortune 500, that is a pretty reasonable expense to have a global platform that you can expose your brand to. I think that's really important because when you think about the marketing attention on sustained customer engagement, for not that much money you can spend tens and hundreds of millions of dollars trying to advertise to achieve that. This is a whole new platform.

I would agree with that completely. Just for digital marketers, just think what your online advertising budget is and a new TLD cost doesn't look so big any more. Think about what the potential benefits would be.

The build or buy question comes up a lot. I personally have never seen a software project that got finished on time or on budget. Given the fact that this is specialized technology and there is a lot of learning that goes into building an online registry services system that does not jeopardize the security and stability of the Internet and the cost of getting these services in the future is likely to go down. I do registry services so it is my business to talk about it like this.
Logic tells you that these services are available at a reasonable cost today, which they are, and you can fire up one of these new TLDs in an existing registry system without having to worry about any of the ICANN questions because you know that will all be taken care of by the registry services provider. You eliminate all the risk related to the technical part of the application.
Then you can focus on your business plan, how is this going to address your strategy and how does this help you brand.

Thank you to the Columbia Business School Center on Global Brand Leadership for addressing how much new TLDs will cost.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• new TLD cost
• dot brand
• registry services