Insight into the Czech Domain Market...

This week, we featured a blog posting on .CZ, the official country-code Top-Level Domain (ccTLD) of the Czech Republic.  In the posting we mentioned one of Czech's leading domainers, Jan Barta and his company, Elephant Orchestra.  Peter Misek, Jan's colleague and head of the domain division at Elephant Orchestra, was kind enough to grant an interview with HEXONET. We would like to share with you his insights.

PETER MISEK: I would say you can attribute the growth in domain name registrations to three elements

1. The drastic reduction of the registration fees for the .cz tld. A few years ago a yearly domain registration would cost as much as 600 CZK whereas now it moves around 200 CZK depending on volume and the registrar.
2. The general spread of broadband coverage and thus the increasing need and motivation for an online presence by more and more companies, businesses and individuals both local and across the country. and
3. The high respect .cz gets over other tlds. Similarly to having seznam.cz before Google, .cz is perceived as a far more trustworthy, strong and a natural tld by the general public. Having a business only with a .com for example doesn't make you look good in some people's eyes. (Note: According to Alexa, Seznam.cz is the top site in the Czech Republic in terms of traffic)

HEXONET: How active is the domainer market in Czech Republic?

PETER MISEK: The domain market is lively relative to the size of the country. The most active platforms for selling domains here is daukce.cz or webtrh.cz but live auctions such as the ones during Domain Day are usually quite active too. You could say that the volume of domains sold is adequate to the size of the market, the average price of a domain sold isn't usually very high compared to other markets such as Poland. However, a large value is assigned to the sale of already developed domains such as was shown by the sale of penize.cz (money.cz) or letenky.cz (flighttickets.cz) which both sold for just under 10 million CZK.

HEXONET: What are the challenges/obstacles for .CZ moving forward?

PETER MISEK: The biggest challenge is obviously the size of the market but that will improve and grow over the time which I believe will come naturally as the momentum is already there. The thing we are trying to do is to educate the public (individuals and business) about the value of a domain name itself, as a brand and as an asset. People here see great value in developed names on which a business is already run, but its hard to explain the value and potential of the "name" only.

HEXONET would like to thank Peter Misek for the feedback he provided. We look forward to meeting Peter and his team at the DOMAINfest conference next month in Prague.