For a company like Dodge (well, I guess their parent company) that's like selling 6-7 cars a quarter. Massive corporations look at numbers like $185,000 and don't even blink.

Dodge is making 30k profit off of each car?

The higher end cars like Charger are hugely profitable (some with six figures of margin). They sold nearly fifty thousand of them in 2023.

I just priced a fully loaded Hellcat[1] Charger (even with stupid stuff like "real carbon fiber inserts" on the interior) on Dodges site, and it was $109 705. Unless you are proposing it costs less than $9.7k to build and transport one, how are they making six figures of margin?

1: "SRT® Hellcat Redeye Jailbreak" actually. I think the marketing department is staffed with 12 year olds.

The SRT Demon starts at $96k and often sell for $225 and up

MSRP was $96k. Dealers would charge extra because... they forcefully injected and monopolized their position as being the only entity that can actually sell you the car.

If they’re trying to stay at product level, it possibly should be.

Let’s say it’s 7 cars a quarter, that is 28 cars in a year. To cover a $185,000 fee, they would need to be generating $6,607 profit per car. Seems doable?

Margins are a question but you can drop $150k on a single dodge diesel pickup

> The evaluation fee alone is $185,000 USD and you have to pay quarterly fees too if I'm not mistaken.

$185k is a rounding error in the marketing budget of many companies

If only there were a better way to deploy that capital. Oh well.

This is the answer. Same thing happened in the early-to-mid 90s. The corporate web site money didn’t come from the IT budget, it came from marketing. The money for the Leased Line Internet connection too, for all but the most R&D focussed companies in the UK. Corporate email for employees and (shudder) actual Internet access for them, often only came later.

I think it can make sense for smaller companies as long as the costs aren't unbearable. There's value in being your own registry operator, especially when it comes to stuff like intellectual property claims, etc..

By being a registry instead of a registrant you get an extra layer of protection that helps to ensure your domain is untouchable. I think it makes a lot of sense to use for long term infrastructure if, again, the costs aren't prohibitive.

Quarterly fees are ~$15k

The domain for my work project was over $400k. Buying a gTLD would have been way cheaper, but wouldn't have managed to get us the cool domain we have.

edit: on the other hand, we're hostage to a country who could ruin everything. I guess someone above my pay grade rolled the dice

People thought it was going to be like the AOL keywords of yore - but it was already so late in the game that nobody gives a shit, you either use google to search for bing or you just don't care.

There's probably ten or twenty domains (not counting my own or my work's) that I can type from memory, the rest I just search for.

The other killer is that "clownfarts.com" looks like a website but www.mcdonalds looks like a typo, even to non-tech people who don't understand any TLD besides the big three.