When it comes down to promotional expenses, domain registrars often manage hefty budgets, spending thousands of dollars on Facebook and Google.
Domain registration costs involve a $0.18 fee that goes to ICANN, and hence lies a certain paradox.
By definition:
“A statement or proposition that, despite sound (or apparently sound) reasoning from acceptable premises, leads to a conclusion that seems senseless, logically unacceptable, or self-contradictory.”
How does this apply to registrars and domain registrations?
Here’s what our friend Dale uncovered:
Domain registrars are currently willing to pay up to $16.23 for you to visit their website, which is more than the cost of a .com domain.
Check out the AdWords rates below, and the CPC for “Domain Registration” and some other similar phrases.
At some point, domain registrars might try giving away domains to the first 100 new customers, roughly the equivalent of 100 times the ICANN fee.
And this is a clear demonstration of how much power Google has in driving traffic.
Domain registration keyword costs – CLICK TO ENLARGE
It is true that without Google, and its traffic driving machines Adwords and Adsense, a lot of brands would be non-existent to customers. That is why generic domains with organic traffic (type-in) are so powerful and why Google hates them and everything that organic traffic stands for.
Richard – A lot of so-called organic traffic is a direct search in Google for the domain, then a click on the obvious top result.
CPC of $16 does not translate in final cost for each click. It will be always less that $16 ( Infact much less).
Even if its $16 for each customer, there are other avenues by which these guys make money like selling hosting, email accounts etc.
These domain registrar don’t run only for Domain investors. Hosting is huge business.
That is basically the same as a type-in. It is just technically counted as a search because Google was very successful in confusing the average user up to a point where he thinks that his google search bar is his address bar… Direct navigation was a very common thing still 10 years ago. Google hated it and viewed it as a threat (rightfully so) to their business so they came up with Chrome and devalued the address bar.