The most profitable part of being a registrar? (1.Viewing)

When you look at registrars like: BuyDomains.com you know their real purpose is to catch expiring domain names and to keep them for themselves. The companies have great portfolios and you know a lot of that came from expiries.

Companies like GoDaddy probably profit the most from this and I would imagine expiring domains are there biggest profit source.

So many small registrars are probably silently doing the same and who could blame them because we cannot let godaddy make all the profit right?

It got me to thinking about cloudflare because I am probably going to move all my non .ca domains there.
I wonder what they do with the expiries and if they have a partnership with another registrar to dispose of them in a profitable way.

I haven't heard of cloudfare?

https://www.cloudflare.com/products/registrar/

Nice find. Interesting... a lot of .ca registrars better hope they don't do that in .CA too...

MapleDots said:

When you look at registrars like: BuyDomains.com you know their real purpose is to catch expiring domain names and to keep them for themselves. The companies have great portfolios and you know a lot of that came from expiries.

[...]

So many small registrars are probably silently doing the same and who could blame them because we cannot let godaddy make all the profit right?

It got me to thinking about cloudflare because I am probably going to move all my non .ca domains there.
I wonder what they do with the expiries and if they have a partnership with another registrar to dispose of them in a profitable way.

Click to expand...

Actually, BuyDomains is not an accredited registrar, but a domain portfolio. They are, however, part of Endurance International. The portfolio used to be one company together with Afternic before that was bought by GoDaddy. This is just a technical difference, as Endurance owns a number of registrars as well.

I would actually venture to say that most small registrars that run their own platforms are letting names expire and delete. This would be because they have other preferences and other products and domains are just a small part of their income. If they use a shared registrar platform, especially one of the larger ones, they are however likely to participate in auctioning off expired domains through that platform.

I have one domain at Cloudflare and I really thought they lacked features, so I just went back to their site and checked (after noticing that I had to reset my 2-factor authentication. They have added a couple of small features, but this is still clearly geared towards selling their services and not much anything else, no wonder due to the at cost price. One big feature I would need to move more domains there is to be able to set my own domain servers and also to be able to set up nameservers based on the name.

Please also note how low some of the margins for registrars are... Always an interesting conversation when someone comes to me and says they want to build a registrar to compete with GoDadddy ;-)