.CM Domain Name Registrations Open – Opportunity or a Waste?
Greetings from Siddharth Rao’s blog! In today’s post – I’m going to talk about a latest development in the domain name business. There have been talks of the much-anticipated Cameroon Domain name extension (.cm) becoming available for public registration – since months now. Some people even speculated this move as a purposeful effort to re-create the demand similar to dot-com registration bubble of the early 1990’s.
For those who don’t know what this is all about – here’s a little background on the developing story. Cameroon is a small country in the African continent which has a domain name extension of “.cm” – just like other countries (for example, Australia has “.au”, India has “.in”, etc.). Every country has something called CCTLD (country code top level domain) – which is available while registering domains for/from that country.
Cutting the long story short and coming to the point – Cameroon ccTLD came into news when someone from Cameroon registered google.cm and put up ads on the resulting page. The page started receiving ton’s of traffic – because “.cm” is a naturally occurring typo when someone tries to type “.com”. It is said that up to 15% of people typing the entire site URL in the address browser can end up doing such a typo for any .com domain name. At least that’s what most registrars have used on their sites – for advertising “.cm” domain name registrations.
This triggered a lot of user interest and talks around making .cm domain name registration open to the entire world – since many people started looking at it as an opportunity to tap on a sizable amount of Internet traffic. Since then – many people have been eagerly waiting for it. To accommodate the sudden rush and interest in these domain names and also to protect the “brand names” / businesses from their respective names – the idea of “land-rush phase” came into play.
Landrush phase was the time when select registrars held auctions on “.cm” domain names – thereby allowing brands/copyrighted keyword owners and general public to “bid” on the names. Any name having more then one bidder would actually enter into “auction mode”. During this landrush some domain names got sold for as high as half a million dollars (that’s what I read on some random blog post by someone else).
Once the landrush phase was over – the registrations were made open to anyone, using regular domain registration practices (with the exception of the price tag, of course). The open registrations commenced from Sept 18, 2009 – and these Cameroon ccTLD names are now available to anyone who wants to register it. However, each domain name registration has varying costs – depending on the registrar. I’m still unsure why this has been set up this way.
Note that very limited domain registrars have been granted the permission to sell “.cm” domains. The two best places that I have found out and recommend are:
NameCheap (cheapest .cm domain registrar)
NameCheap is selling each “.cm” domain for $105 (yeah, I know – that’s over 10x the original .com domain name registration cost).
DomainMonster is slightly expensive compared to NameCheap – but they have bulk discounts. So it would be recommended for someone who really wants to register over 25 domains or so. Otherwise – I would go nowhere else but only NameCheap.
Having said all that – the question here is that is it really worth spending $105 for a “.cm” domain name (which eventually can only be tapped as a typo of the equivalent .com domain)? The answer can be “yes” and “no” – as it depends on several factors. If you can find a high volume keyword/site name which is not “copyrighted” and who’s .cm domain name is available – you can register it and tap on say 3-4% of the typo traffic coming on it. If the original .com site has 2 million visitors on it – every month then 3-4% of that number can be really substantial. If you can target that traffic to the right stuff, there’s indeed a very good opportunity.
Alternately – you can register one of the domain names of a very small brand that is on the rise. If they grow over time, you can go back to them and auction their brand name’s .cm domain and ask for a healthy price tag to sell it ; - ). The possibilities are only limited by the extent of your creativity and imagination. However, you need to be calculative and careful before buying these domain names. Since they cost $105 a piece, it’s not hard to loose your shirt – if you are not thoughtful : - )
I bought my share of domains around some different test models that I have in mind. Lets see if this investment proves to be a useful one for me. Anyway – that’s it for today. Some exciting stuff is going to be on this blog very soon. I’m looking forward to posting it as soon as I’m done with it.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment