In recent weeks, GoDaddy discounted new dot tv (.tv) registrations.  Today, I stumbled upon a GoDaddy press release titled, “GoDaddy Makes It Easy To Help Users Leverage Web Video & Other Rich Media Content.” It states that “registering a dot tv domain” is “the best way to integrate video into your site, whether you are just getting started or you already have an established presence in need of an easy online renovation.” I wonder how many people actually read this and believe it.  The dot tv extension is attractive and an excellent tool to feature videos but it is no more difficult to add a video to a website on any other extension. 

Clearly, GoDaddy would love if if people registered dot tv domains with their company, but what they would love is for people to register and renew their names with GoDaddy. 

Generally, GoDaddy will advertise an attractive registration price for dot tv and then maintain a high renewal price.  This attracts domainers and non-domainers alike because the discounted registration price is usually the lowest in the industry.  GoDaddy rarely offers a dot tv renewal price that is competitive with other registrars.  However, the non-domainers are unaware of this and under the belief that GoDaddy is the cheapest.  They, not the regular domainers, are the group that get sucked into paying GoDaddy’s steap renewals.

Everybody I know will take advantage of the cheap registration prices at GoDaddy and transfer them to another registrar before the 1st year of registration is up.  Or they will register multiple years at the intial discounted rate and wait until the initial registration years come up for expiration before they transfer them elsewhere.

Check out the press release after the jump. 

As you could probably tell by the lack of new blogs for the last few weeks, I decided to take a break because I wanted to step back and survey the domaining environment without having much if any involvement in it AND I wanted to return with a fresh perspective.  That is not to say that I wasn’t already overwhelmed with the additional consulting and development work I agreed to do for other people.

First things first…