Frank Shilling, CEO at Uniregistry, the company that operates a portfolio of 27 generic top-level domains, announced that late summer – early autumn the registry will significantly raise the registration and renewal fees in 16 zones. The raise will affect domains .juegos, .hosting, .audio, .diet, .hiphop, .flowers, .guitars, .property, .blackfriday, .sexy, .christmas, .click, .help, .pics, .tattoo and .link. Shilling explains that this is done for economic reasons only. According to him, the new domains attracted less attention than initially thought. This is why the number of registered names in the majority of these zones doesn't exceed 2 thousand. However, for every new gTLD the registry pays $25 thousand to ICANN every year. Therefore, to economically justify keeping the domain zones it's necessary to raise the registration and renewal fees.
Moreover, for many domains the increase will be enormous. For example, OnlineDomain published data of Blacknight, a large Irish registrar, which works with all mentioned domain zones. According to Blacknight, . link will suffer the least from the increase. The registration fee proposed by the registry to the registrars will be increased by 5%. However, Blacknight is willing to keep the price for its registrants as it was at 8.99 euro. Domain .juegos will suffer the most. The increase in price will be a record 3115 percent. Instead of current 11.99 euro the annual registration fee after the increase will be 349 euro at Blacknight.
