Tucows' Domain Portfolio

The company opens up its list of surnames for resale by webhosts and ISPs.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [March 24, 2008]

Toronto-based Tucows announced last month that it has over 150,000 domain names in its portfolio, including:

• Over 1,00 "gems", which are the highest value names, and, presumably, will be sold
  
  
• 22,000 brandable names
  
  
• 88,000 direct navigation names that the company monetizes
  through pay per click advertising
  
  
• 39,000 surnames
  
  
• Of greatest interest to ISPs and webhosts are the surnames, which the company says cover over 65 percent of the population of North America. Adam Eisner, Tucows product manager for domains, points out that because these names are owned by Tucows, only Tucows and its resellers can offer them.

"Say you wanted alex@goldman.net," explains Eisner (of course, goldman.com is not available). For $0.75 per month, you could get the alex@goldman.net e-mail address and the alex.goldman.net domain name."

Tucows allows the reseller to set the CNAME record so that they can host the address themselves. The e-mail address comes with the full portfolio of e-mail services (webmail, anti-spam, etc.).

Eisner says that because there are so many possible combinations of names, most people's names are still available, even the most common names. "So if bob.wilson.org is unavailable, we might have bob.thewilsons.com available."

Politics
Is there a conflict of interest in a domain registrar holding a portfolio of domain names? 'We're very careful. At make sure our policies are registrant friendly. There are registrars who engage in bad practices. If you compare our terms of service with others, you'll see that our rules, such as grace periods and renewal policies, are clearly defined."

The company is active in ICANN. At the last meeting, in India, Eisner says, the issues of domain tasting and transfer policies were discussed. Eisner's opinions on these issues are clearly stated in the Tucows blog.

As things stand, he writes, ICANN's policies result in, "short-term trademark infringement, consumer confusion as sites disappear/re-appear (and point to advertising), and a great deal of unnecessary (and potentially dangerous) operational load."

Isn't the domain names business about ensuring an artificial scarcity of names? "It's interesting that you should say that now as .asia goes live on March 26. Most of the demand we see is for names in .com, .org, and .net. It will be interesting to see what happens as new tlds hit the market, such as .tel and .me."

Add-ons
Tucows offers additional domain name services we were not aware of. The company has partnered with DomainsBot to offer resellers a more powerful domain name search technology.

"The webhosting purchase process starts with a domain name," notes Eisner. "I'm amazed at how many webhosts, if a customer types "hockey league" into their search tool, will reject that as invalid. Why not give customers as many options as possible to find a domain name they want? Why make it harder for them to find a domain name? That's just hindering the chances of a sale."

If you type "hockey league" into the search engine at domainspot.org, the engine will use synonyms and other data to provide names that are relevant but not too long. When we tried it, good suggestions included clubhockey.com, icehockeyleague.com, and easyicehockeyleague.com. These examples show you how this superior technology works.

Another add-on from Tucows involves its partnership with other domain name portfolio owners, such as buydomains.com and fabulous.com. "If you're an SMB, would you rather have an okay domain name for $10, or have the exact name you want for a few hundred or a thousand dollars," says Eisner. "We've seen that customers are more than happy to put up the money to purchase these domains. An example would be a business name combined with a city name, such as sanjosecomputers.com."

That domain name is available for $1,400 as I write this.

The bottom line, Eisner says, is that standing out is getting tougher and tougher, so Tucows is looking for services that enable its resellers to stand out above the competition.

The corollary, I would add, is that those services allow Tucows to differentiate itself from its competitors.

—End