AOL email domains: a big move

AOL just launched a new service allowing people to choose a new, unregistered domain name to use alongside a free email account.  So theoritically if I didn't own johndemayo.com, AOL would register it for me, and set up a free email account for me (i.e. me@johndemayo.com), saving me the $7 or so per year it would normally cost me for the domain.

I can see this feature having huge appeal, and being very viral in nature.  I just hope they aren't paying the standard registrar fee of $6.75 per domain, or the economics are almost sure to be upside-down.  I guess since the core registry doesn't need to map the domain on the web, and only needs to route email, they may somehow be getting a break on the per-domain per-year pricing.

It will be very interesting to see how this plays out - its a big move on AOL's part in my opinion, and has the potential for a very significant amount of impact.

http://www.domains.aol.com

Addition:  Thinking about the economics more, since each domain name registered can have up to 100 users, its possible they can make money even at the $6.75 per domain per year cost.  Running through some really rough numbers:

Domain costs $6.75 per year.

Let's assume each is used by 5 active users.

Over the course of a year, if each user checks 3 emails a day, AOL gets roughly 5 ad impressions.

So 5 users * 5 ad impressions per day * 365 days per year = 9,125 ad impressions per year per domain.

At a reasonable average $1/CPM, they net $9.12 per year on a domain cost of $6.75......if they can indeed get that much activity per domain.

Comments

[PJ]

The bad part of the deal is that the domain is registered to AOL.