What do big companies that use brand protection company’s to register and buy domain names spend to protect, acquire, register and renew domain names?
WikiLeaks.org published invoices from MarkMonitor to Sony, documents (PDF)
In those invoices published by WikiLeaks , MarkMonitor.com billed Sony $1,000 several times for a “Domain Acquisition Fee” for domain names that are not owned by Sony.
WOF.com, is for an example (page 60 in the pdf) a domain Sony does not own, nor has ever owned, according to whois records, yet was charged $1,000 for a “Domain Acquisition Fee”.
Since Sony was charged $1,000 for a “Domain Acquisition Fee” it seems MarkMonitor, at that time (2013), was charging Sony $1,000 to attempt to acquire a domain name, even if they were not successful.
Of course we do not know what the fee would have been if MarkMonitor.com were successful in acquiring the domain name.
Since the Sony/MarkMonitor invoices posted on Wikileaks are dated in 2013/2014, these fees could have went up or down and could be different depending on the client/volume.
Another domain name that MarkMonitor charged $1K “domain acquisition fee” was in a July 2013 invoice on page 18 and was for Interactive.la, which Sony did not acquire nor ever owned according to whois records.. Interestingly, the domain is available now on Afternic for $5,900 Buy it Now. I would love to know what Sony’s budget for the domain was, since they spent $1K to try to acquire it but did not according to whois records.
MarkMonitor, according to the invoices released by WikiLeaks.com, charged Sony $17 per .Com/.Net domain name registration or renewal , but some ccTLD & ccSLD domain extensions were priced substantially higher (below)
- Sony’s invoice from MarkMonitor just for the month of January 2014 was a whopping $48,305.00.
- Sony’s invoice from MarkMonitor just for the month of July 2013 was $35,274.00.
- Sony’s invoice from MarkMonitor just for the month of September 2013 was $41,133,16.00.
That January 2014 invoice was 65 pages long and included registrations, renewals and domain transfers (same cost as renewal/registration).
Each page had 20 items, with the last page having 11, in total: 1,291 items.
According to DomainTools.com, Sony currently owns 10,339 domain names associated with just the one email address of spe_hostmaster@spe.sony.com (they may use other email addresses for Sony owned Domains). We don’t know how many domain names Sony owned by at the time of the invoices
You do the math.
That January invoice is over $48,000 for what appears to be around 10% of the domain names Sony owns
According to the information posted by Wikileaks, MarkMonitor billed Sony (2014 invoice) registration or renewal fees for ccTLD’s & ccSLD’s as much as 15X more, compared to what the largest domain name registrar in the world GoDaddy.com charges currently for registrations or renewals in the same extensions (We used EuroDNS for domain extension not offered by Godaddy):
TLD | MarkMonitor 2013/2104 | GoDaddy Current (unless stated)
- .com.mx | $100 | $9.99
- .de | $45 | $7.99
- .ch | $181.50 | $14.99
- .ru | $150 | $14.99
- .at | $199 | $23.99
- .tv | $75 | $39.99
- .com.uy | $450 | $183.51 (EuroDNS)
- .pt | $275 | $37.14 (EuroDNS)
- .com.pt | $275 | $37.14 (EuroDNS)
- .be | $68 | $11.99
- .it | $85 | $12.99
- .com.bo | $550 | $161.66 (EuroDNS)
- .xxx | $150 | $99.99
- .co | $85 | $2.99 1st yr (Special Promo)
So when a Big Company complains about how much they spend on domain names, it looks like they spend a ton.