GlobalBlock is an impressive service, with the high price tag to match. Last week we learned that the coverage was growing even further, with the addition of China’s .CN and Germany’s .DE (GlobalBlock Adds World’s Largest ccTLDs in New Expansion, Instantly Increasing Coverage by More Than 10 Percent). These could soon be followed by Amazon’s full slate of new gTLDs (Amazon joining GlobalBlock).
New domain extensions were being added with some regularity, but this feels like a tipping point. This article will examine whether this new coverage level has created a surplus value for brands that didn’t find one when they first considered GlobalBlock.
As a starting point, let’s try and define the value of the service, which has both a tangible and intangible component:
If the brand can simply drop domains from its defensive portfolio with the security that nobody else can register them, those savings are quantifiable: It’s whatever they spend to renew these domains each year. Excepting very large brands, this calculus alone doesn’t justify the cost of GlobalBlock.
Of the 780 domain name extensions covered by the service, a perfectly sound defensive strategy could include fewer than 50. In this common scenario, the gap between savings from dropped domains and the cost of GlobalBlock would come to a few thousand Euro.
So, the brand is deciding whether to allocate this money to blocking domains that they had already decided not to register defensively. In other words, it’s an opportunity to block another 600+ domain name extensions, with little administrative burden and at a price much lower than actually registering each of the domains.
Neither the companies that sell GlobalBlock subscriptions, nor the companies that buy them, can be completely happy that this value is so murky. Both sides would be better served if the TLDs coverage better mirrored a realistic defensive domain portfolio and represented more direct savings.
This is why the recent additions are noteworthy. .CN, .DE and Amazon’s .BOT, .NOW, .FREE and .YOU are commonly part of defensive domain portfolios. Still, the total annual cost of a couple domains under each of these extensions comes in lower than 1000 EUR – Not quite enough to make up the typical “few thousand euro” gap we estimated above. Alas, undecided brands still need to wade through murkiness of intangible value.
The (perhaps unsatisfactory) answer to the question posed in this article is that “it just depends.” A brand that was on the fence about GlobalBlock may be swayed by a few hundred Euros in new, tangible savings. On the other hand, a few hundred Euros won’t do much to persuade a brand that expects to recoup nearly the total cost of GlobalBlock by dropping domains from its defensive portfolio.
There’s a question remaining in all of this, albeit one that escapes the framework of this article’s focus on .CN, .DE and Amazon TLDs.
Is it worth spending this money to block domains that weren’t even part of the brand’s defensive strategy?
After two years working with the service, IP Twins can bear witness to brands having taken the leap and being glad that they did. At the risk of oversimplifying, we’d highlight two general scenarios where this tends to occur more than others:
The company has a clear, flagship brand.
It’s more feasible for these companies to strive for completeness in their defensive portfolio without the budget spiraling out of control. For example, during a new TLD launch these brands may only consider one defensive registration, whereas for a pharmaceutical company might need to consider 50 for each of its different drugs. One registration per domain extension is doable. It’s likely these companies would have considered registering a single domain under many of the 780 extensions covered, but such registrations were never proposed to them. These companies appreciate gaining additional coverage at a lower per-domain price and without having to make hundreds of registration/renewal decisions.
The brand has been a frequent target of online fraud
The GlobalBlock subscriber has no way to know when a third-party domain registration is blocked, much less if a specific blocked registration was destined for fraudulent use that would have cost thousands to remediate. However, subscribers can compare their yearly expenditure in online enforcement between years in which they had GlobalBlock and years when they did not. Brands in certain industries don’t see much change because they weren’t spending much on enforcement to begin with, but for brands in industry in which fraud is an issue, the savings do tend to show up and exceed the value of GlobalBlock.
If a brand under your management was a “hard no” on subscribing to GlobalBlock, the addition of a handful of relevant domain name extensions won’t move the needle. If the brand was a “maybe,” or if it identifies with either of the scenarios in the previous section but hadn’t given due consideration to GlobalBlock, this is a good time to take a fresh look at the service. IP Twins Account Managers are happy to go over the pros and cons for a given brand and assist you in making an informed decision.