Just saw this in GoDaddy's customer newsletter... They've launched a Discount Domain Club. Once you've paid a $89.99 annual membership fee, you'll be able to register .com domains for $6.49, and .net domains for $6.99. While these prices are 22% to 27% less than GoDaddy's regular rates, they're 7% to 14% higher than 1&1's $5.99 loss leader deal.
I'm guessing what GoDaddy really wants to sell is its CashParking program, which offers a 60%-80% cut of ad proceeds from your parked domains. Discount Domain Club members get the $107.88/year premium CashParking plan for free.
If you're not an active domain collector, you'd figure that you'll have to register 37 domains a year to break even on your $89.99 investment. That's probably not going to happen. You might also be a little skeptical of the CashParking offer. If these are your domains, why should GoDaddy have access to 20% of your ad revenue? Wouldn't you be better off setting up AdSense yourself?
And if you own a large domain portfolio and are looking for an automated monetization solution, you might prefer a vendor who doesn't splash its brand name all over your inventory. You'd also be curious about new services like Sendori (I read about them on TechCrunch). When visitor types in the URL of your parked domain, Sendori redirects them to a sponsor's website instead of showing them a page full of ads. And you'd surely be keeping an eye on Demand Media's plans to bring user generated content (and repeat visitors!) to parked domains.
By the way, the discount club concept reminds me a little bit of Amazon Prime, which gives participating customers unlimited 2-day shipping for a $79 annual fee. Amazon told InfoWorld last year that the program has been "very expensive". On the other hand, members tend to buy larger quantities of products from a wider variety of categories. Hmm... should GoDaddy have bundled benefits associated with non-domain products into its discount club?
