I’m amazed at how few domain name registrars spend any money advertising to the domain name community. With many of the readers of domain name blogs and members of domain name forums having hundreds, even thousands, of domains, I just can’t understand why most of them don’t spend more advertising to this highly targeted group. On many of the domaining blogs, it’s between $25 and $300 per month to have a banner ad on  a website which gets anywhere from a few thousand to tens of thousands of visitors per month. As I said when opening this article, this is extremely targeted traffic, and in most cases, you could recoup the full month’s advertising by having but a couple domainers transfer their domains to your registrar — if that (don’t forget about the value derived from keeping current customers). Advertising on domain name forums tends to be a whole lot more expensive, however their traffic is also much higher. The price of eyeballs is ridiculously cheap in this industry. A #1 placement on Google for many domaining related keywords will set you back $XX per click. I’d much rather have a full month of advertising on a popular domain name blog or forum than a few clicks on Google, which I highly doubt are any more targeted than the visitors to a domain name blog or forum.

So, what gives? The profits per name aren’t very high at most registrars, however the audience they’d be advertising to in this case have hundreds, even thousands of domains — I can’t see how this wouldn’t be profitable. With more and more domainers getting into domain name development, you also have the possibility of upselling them on hosting or domain name development packages. Why wouldn’t registrars form partnerships with sites like Whypark, SiteGraduate, AEIOU, etc – they could help their domainer customers get the domains they want developed at a reasonable price and at the same time, make what would probably be a very large amount of additional income through affiliate commissions.

Most of the domain name parking and domain name development companies get it — you can find their ads on many of the top domaining sites. Domain Capital gets it, Hitfarm gets it, most of the domain name conferences get it. But where are the domain name registrars? I’ll give credit to Godaddy here — they clearly get it. Moniker and Fabulous get it too — they take part in domaining conferences which does get them exposure to many top domainers, however I think they could both do more. Rebel.com? I’ve sure seen a lot of their ads lately, along with LogicBoxes. For the most part however, I’m largely unimpressed and don’t think most of the ICANN accredited registrars are doing anything near what they should be doing if they want to gain a very sizable portion of domain name registrations (those of domainers).

If we look at registries, the situation is much the same — how many of them advertise their extensions to domainers? The .me extension is an excellent example of how a registry can be successfully promoted. At least early on, .mobi was a good example of this as well. People aren’t going to buy something if they don’t even know it exists… I’m amazed all the smart people working for so many of these companies spend so little of their advertising budget  targeting people responsible for a large portion of their revenue. More than just domain registrations, this costs them non-domainer sales as well. When a non-domainer friend of mine wants to put up a website (hosting = mega-profits for web hosts/registrars), who am I going to recommend? Am I going to recommend the company I’ve never heard of or someone who I know will do a good job?

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