Afternoon Folks!!
Gtld's Reach 1 Million in just 6 months!! Gtld's Reach 1 million in just 6 months!! Gtld's Reach 1 Million in just 6 months!! Gtld's Reach 1Million in just 6 months!! Let me repeat as you will see this SPIN on every domain blog and further. But what a load of CRAP!
The numbers are PATHETIC! The lack of marketing is REMARKABLE. Their attitude to domainers in some cases is off the hook.
Many promising millions of registrations and here we have over 125 extensions out and COMBINED they can barely get to a million after several months and NONE have even broken 100,000 mark. Well over 125 extensions and COMBINED they will have a party at a million. Whoopee! Really??
Watch http://ntldstats.com/tld daily and you will see that the MAJORITY of gTLD's have already STALLED. And this is still their debut period!! It gets worse from here not better. If they were planes, they would have already crashed and burned.
How many registered by end users that are not domainers and are not buying for defensive purposes? Trumpet that number if you can find it or figure it out. Get your binoculars out. It may be in the far distant future if at all.
How many MILLIONS of other TLD's were registered in the same time frame? Look at that data. With no trumpets or any fanfare. Where are the headlines? Most of them to REAL end users. And when one gTLD does something bad it tarnishes all of them. Something I have said for quite some time but many just dismiss. Misdeeds by one spill over to all and I have been stating that LONG before any came to market. How you could NOT see that coming is my only question??
Those that can make a coherent argument of why they belong in the eco system have a chance and that is why I have repeatedly said I believe there is a place for the .Geos in the eco system. Still not a sure bet. But at least there appears to be or could be a rhyme and a reason. An obvious rhyme and reason. But even so, it does not guarantee adaptation and other hurdles that many like to ignore and get pissed when I point out.
The obstacles they face IMHO are almost insurmountable and the BIG obstacles they face are yet to come. Can a few of the 1400 break thru? YES, maybe. That means that over 1300 won't. And I don't care if the registry makes money. That has NOTHING to do with investing in their extensions. Adaptation is what counts, not their profits or their losses. Inside baseball that has no bearing on anything. Buy into the company if you think the extension is that good and you like the registry model. But last time I looked most of us are domain investors. Just because 1400 companies decide to print stamps does not mean they become collectibles. Chances are quite the opposite.
Kool-aid and hype. The desert is coming soon and DOMAINERS are picking up almost the entire tab and being totally abused in the process. This practice of clawing back valuable domains is just one of many unethical practices I see going on right now and domainers are not ony powerless, but these companies now EXPECT to have the domain investor PAY FOR THIER MISTAKES! Keep eating shit folks.
The exaggerations are over the top. The promises are empty. The attitude to anyone that does not fall in line is stunning.
So I decided to Pre-empt the coming headlines in case it is a surprise if everyone runs the same headline at the same time. I guess then it becomes meaningless. Gtld's Reach 1 Million Registrations in just 6 months!!
1,000,000 TIMES!
Rick Schwartz
Patrick Hipskind
The overall lack of marketing is an insult to domain investors who have put their hard earned money into this gTLD expansion. When I go to various news websites on the Internet and industry related websites, I NEVER see any banner ads promoting the gTLDs.
People visiting such websites are a captured audience who may purchase a domain name, and yet no ads are being delivered to them. That’s a big marketing mistake in my book. The only banner ads I see are on domain name investing blogs.
Domenclature.com
I endorse this preemption post 100%
Leonad Britt
While the geo and real estate TLDs are tempting, because I do outbound marketing of my own portfolio I am aware of how challenging it can be to sell domains which don’t have significant type-in traffic. I do get plenty of “How much?” inquiries so there is some interest but converting those leads into sales is another thing. So while I have found some unique reg opportunities in .COM and .COM.CO (Colombia’s cctld) in recent months, I am yet to reg even one new TLD.
DonnyM
IMO they could give these extensions away and they would still have a hard time getting people to take notice. People are used to paying 8 or 10 bucks for a name not 30 or ?, so these GTLDS are dead on arrival based upon price alone. —Minus geo extensions but those are limited. I like. web, app and bet, but that is it far out.
I don’t when or if Google will offer Gtld’s but if and when they do, all they have to do is drop a Free domain name into the promotions box of your gmail account and they will register more than anyone. It’s what I would do if I was competing. They could get more Regs in 1 week than what they have total now with everyone.
They have the marketing power and know what your interests are. I would sure hate to follow them as a new GTLD. ‘California chrome is coming up behind their asses”.:) to crap on all of them.
BullS
Fool’s gold.
They are ruining the domain industry and shooting themselves in the foot.
Nobody is going to take them seriously now. this is like a comical scam artist.
William
The confusion and lack of marketing by the gtld’s is creating an opportunity for investors in my opinion. I am thankful that so many of the big .com players are so negative on the new extensions because there are great names available to be registered by someone like me. If the big guys were interested, there would be programs buying up every potentially valuable single and double word combo in the first 10 minutes of availability.
Using the stamps analogy, it is true that gtld’s don’t become collectable simply because someone creates them. However, there is an intrinsic value to a stamp in that you can buy it and use it to send a letter or package. It has value regardless of its desirability as a collectible. People who buy domain names are not really buying extensions, they are buying the best way they can afford for people to be able to connect with their business online. In some limited cases the single word .com address might be for sale and within a companies budget. For instance, stamps.com might be available and a company might be able to pay 500k for the name. If the name is not for sale or the company cannot afford it, they are still going to buy a domain name. The difference is that now, instead of buying eMyStampsocity.com they have the option of Stamps.club or Stamps.xyz or Stamps.center or Stamps.whatever. No, Stamps.whatever will not sell for 500k because it is not a collectible. But any of these names are upgrades over eMyStampsocity.com and they do have value.
People are accustomed to change and eager to embrace new technology. Look how quickly whatsapp has been adopted. People went from exchanging personal email to friending each other on facebook almost overnight. Hashtags are everywhere, even places they don’t belong. People will get the hang of the new gtld’s pretty fast and when they do, it might even be cool to be comless.
Mark
Quantity is not quality. While 99.9% of nTLDs has been registered by domainers and other speculators, there is next to zero use in real business and commerce. I see no end-user value in nTLD. I don’t care about domainer-to-domainer resales – that is absolutely not important for me, even when it comes to .com names. End user valuation is the only important factor. And .com is the only king in this field, some other gTLDs (.net, .org) are next, then ccTLD (but only for local country representations), and at the end, close to black hole is nTLD extension.
Michael
Face it these new domains look funny!
Stamps.club or Stamps.xyz or Stamps.center
I can’t even tell they’re domain names, looks like two words with a period in the middle. Every end user with a little bit of computer experience knows they want .com and every domainer has always dreamed about making there own extension and selling their own names! :)
Steve Mugavero
“When anything is attempted to be supported by lying, it is presumptive evidence that the thing so supported is also a lie. The stock on which a lie can be grafted must be the same species as the graft.” TP
Andrea Paladini
“This practice of clawing back valuable domains is just one of many unethical practices I see going on right now and domainers are not ony powerless, but these companies now EXPECT to have the domain investor PAY FOR THIER MISTAKES! Keep eating shit folks.
The exaggerations are over the top. The promises are empty. The attitude to anyone that does not fall in line is stunning.”
I totally agree with Rick, unfortunately many unscrupulous, big ego and utterly arrogant people with lack of ethics and full of conflicts of interests are ruining the industry …
William Etomi
The success of gTLDs will be realized when major brands start using their extensions in marketing campaigns. Drink.Starbucks, Love.McDonalds, Run.Nike, as an example. People will soon adapt to the new format of domain name when they see advertisements featuring such branding, but you must wait a couple of years. Patience!
Patrick Hipskind
I’ve been checking out some of the larger sites that have 3rd party ads like wsj.com, business.com, etc. I haven’t seen any ads on those sites for gTLDs, however, I did see an ad for .XYZ on TechCrunch.com. It seems Daniel is placing some well targeted ads and that is nice to see.
brand
@ William, that’s what i have said from the start of all this, when i think it was .tips and a few other’s that where the first out of the gate.
When i see a commercial on t.v where a company has spent major advertising dollars on a .guru or a .sexy, then i would think they may have a slim chance.
Speaking for myself, its hard enough to sell the ones i own now, trying to find an end user that see’s the value in a domain name and is willing to spend a few bucks.
For me to buy into these new extensions is just upping the ante for me with the high reg fee’s and those outrageous renewals just to hope that another investor will come along and buy one, cause we know the business community has no clue what the hell a .shoe is or a .diamonds is. But i thought there was going to be a .arse ?, if so i have dibs on sexy.arse.lol
John
I don’t want to sound like a “besotted acolyte” of the king, but I’ve really come to love this guy. He probably wouldn’t even like me, though. LOL. I’m definitely anything but an ass-kisser, though, but simply honest. I’m the same John who didn’t like his tadpole.com and said so at another blog. But I still love him regardless of how he feels about me. :D :D
Btw, I personally think .club may wind up being one of the few winners among the ones that exist so far, and also agree about the geo’s.
“How many registered by end users that are not domainers […]”
LOL, yup. :D
Bartles
I say it’ll be just another week before they are all officially declared dead. Or, did that happen immediately after 50 Cent’s apparent $@#!@#-up at .club’s grand opening event? To me anyways, his comment was absolutely devastating and entirely undermined the integrity of the entire gtld notion. Do the next 1000+ really need to be introduced? Why? I think it’ll be a waste of everyone’s time. I’d be pretty worried if I were the President of Donuts right now.
Danny Pryor
We should do a little math and find out how many .com registrations there have been in the same time period. ;-)
simple-man
I am not surprised at the lack of interest/registrations.
In the last few years, we have almost dropped 100% of our non-Dot-Com domains and now our portfolio is 99.6% dot-Com.
We have NOT registered even a single newGTLD domain.
NEIL
Is not so easy to be smart domainer.
All egarbage is already sold.
Klondike Domain Rush is fierce and dangerous.
The end users are greedy, smart and malicious.
The registrar sells premium domain names at astronomical prices, “Just for the first year”…
The new extensions have high speculative prices.
Is this the Crisis, or just Abnormal Normality?
We Need A King!
NEIL
Rick & Domainers Chiefs, are you OK in Vegas.com?
http://news.yahoo.com/2-officers-3-others-dead-las-vegas-shooting-232556307.html
Hope everything is fine.
Jeff Schneider
Hello Rick,
Way more attention has been inadvertantly focused on the .COM sector. Is anyone surprised?
Gratefully, Jeff Schneider (Contact Group) (Metal Tiger)
Surya
Those Domain Investors are trying to follow you Rick, hopping that new GTLDs would be sold very expensive as your dot com, just like your EBid.com or Sex.com. The problem is not every new GTLDs will be as expensive as gold like your dot com. Might be some will be. Might be other GTLD will be always silly names for end users, but at least domainers buy those names because they are sound good for themself. That’s why new GTLDs are sold like delicious peanuts, and there will be always domainers to buy them.
James Wester
Good take on this Rick. It is a lot of noise and I don’t see the .xyz issue getting handled properly, which will further damage not only their brand, but other new gtlds as well.
Colin Campbell
James, Rick and others,
I think we can all agree that the wide use of the extension will ultimately lead to longterm success. 50cent partnered with .CLUB to promote the .CLUB extension. We have a marketing deal with him and we will continue to work with him. Since the 50cent launch party we have seen so many companies and individuals launch .CLUB sites including lovato.club with over 337,000 video downloads in 10 days. Truth is I never even heard of Demi Lovato until she launched her lovato.club fan site. This is a real use case unlike any we have ever seen by a new gTLD site. Real sites are popping up for those TLDs that actually have meaning. The stats do show us 1 thing. Those TLDs that do not have meaning and try to take on .COM have very weak demand. Lovato used Lovato.club because it just made sense. She self selected the name. .CLUB is the natural site for fanclubs and now millions of people will have a chance to see that address in use. Similar to how .Wiki would be chosen if one was to launch a wiki about some topic. I can’t imagine her deciding one day to use lovato.abc.
Sure if the lovato.com was available today she still would have likely chosen a .COM. But the reality is more often than not it has been taken or it is too expensive so the next best alternative is a name that has meaning.
Colin
domainscience
Okay,
It’s not about the registrations.
It’s about what they do after they register the domain name(s).
The many .Com’s have been built out.
However, if a million .whatever’s have been registered today and nobody is really developing them into a business, than what’s the point?
DonnyM
Is she not using her main site demilovato.com and that the .club is just an extension of that. Famous people always us full name in domain names. Not to say that .club will not have it’s place with this situation but it looks like main driver of traffic is the full .com name.
DemiLovato
Colin Campbell
Lovato.club is her paid fan club whereas .com is her main site. Again, we don’t compete directly with the .com. This is a great example of how we compliment the .com. If you get a chance check out the video to see how she uses lovato.club.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reYDxBd3BDY
John
Hi Colin – Any way you guys could allow the domains to show up at your official whois page? Not a single .club I’ve ever checked has ever shown up, and it really makes things difficult in terms of finding out the status, etc., especially for ones for which it is very unclear whether someone has it regged or it is reserved, with no discoverable info except a registrar saying it’s unavailable, while another whois service says it’s not even registered. I am of course talking about this page: http://whois.nic.club/whoismtld/whois/
Thanks…
Colin Campbell
John,
When we launched we had 1 hand tied behind our back by ICANN (maybe 2 hands). We do have premium names, but we also have thousands of names in domain collision which show up as unavailable. Ironically these names will be released in Sept/Oct. depending on the gods of ICANN at very low prices.
Realistically what you are proposing makes logical sense. Just state the status of every name. Hopefully Nuestar and .Club will get there in the next couple of months. Truth is we are the pioneers paving the path for the other great names like .web and .shop. ….so I will be sure to provide the feedback.
Colin
John
“Realistically what you are proposing makes logical sense. Just state the status of every name.”
Well, Colin, I certainly like what you’ve done in bringing .club to market, though I was definitely much more skeptical at first I admit, way back when. I actually like the extension personally now, especially with the “non-ludicrous” pricing. I’d love to see this one succeed and suspect it will as a rare example among the stampede of crazy apples (mixed metaphor there). Ultimately it’s really just data in a database, the whois thing. I don’t know if you’re an IT guy yourself at all or someone else handles all of that and you’re not really familiar with SQL and database topics, but to tell you the truth it should really be pretty easy to implement, even quickly. It would be pretty straightforward logic and go something like this:
1. if regged, then show whois data in query
2. if reserved, then add “reserved” status whois data to database and show in whois query
3. if “premium,” then add “premium” status whois data to database and show in whois query
4. if currently held in “collision” status, then add “collision” status whois data and pending release date to database and show in whois query
It should really be a snap for whoever handles your IT, and I think could be of great benefit to the rest of us, not to mention probably encourage more business over time as people are no longer swimming in the dark so to speak. I guess the short version of that would be “win-win.”
It would pretty much be impossible for this data to not already exist in some form for internal use, so it would really be just a matter of running some SQL statements and perhaps a little bit of pretty simple short code to put it together in a database that your official whois page could draw from.
And so forth. As it is, however, the whois page simply indicates that no domain even exists.
Well, would be nice to see that soon and appreciate your reply above. Congrats on everything so far…
UFO
My last post simply disappeared on this blog which seems to indicate it has a problem that typepad users where getting, the same bug must have followed the script through.
Anyway, in short form to what I wrote, basically new gtlds are somewhat doomed simply because people have difficulty recognising they are in fact domains. Sure you can put prior prefixs on such as http://www.dead.dodo but that defeats the point. You can put deaddodo.com on a billbooard and consumers will know implicity that its a domain. In effect .com says its the www
Personally I think these novelty gtlds are losing out to the prior first movers and internet standard but also to the common hashtag as thats becoming a better indexing basis, not sure if google is indexing hashtags. Facebook as a company advertising locator will lose out as well. My forecast .com and # going forward.
Colin Campbell
Nice suggestion John, I am not really an IT guy or geek. I only aspire to be one. That being said, I have forwarded your blog to Dirk Bhagat, CTO and co-founder of .CLUB.
Alex I.
Colin, thanks for sharing this case study.
Was Demi, or anyone associated with her, compensated in anyway for using the .Club extension?
Thanks.
Colin Campbell
No. Her launch was as surprise to us all.
Domenclature.com
Mr. Schwartz,
There’s a big story similar to Overstock.co, or BIGGER at:
https://medium.com/@ajt/how-we-got-the-com-for-our-startup-b48fd6c5511
It was first revealed by Kirikos to another blogger who treated the matter lightly. You will probably be the best person to look at it’s ramification, and break the story properly.
One excerpt:
“Losing Business Because Of .com
At the same time, SocialRank.com now had a new homepage. The homepage was confusing our users. It said that you could now request access to SocialRank. We had a lot of people tweet about wanting an early-access code and people emailing us personally asking us for early-access. For every 5 people that contacted us, we probably lost another 10 that didn’t. Here is an example of someone from social media at @United asking for a code (hint: we don’t have a code, just log in with Twitter):”
Thanks
John
Hi Domenclature,
That was an interesting and enjoyable read, thanks for posting. I’m the same John who has posted in this thread on Rick’s Blog and who had the pleasure of posting in agreement with you over here back in April: “Second US bill would block IANA transition” – domainincite(dot)com/16400-second-us-bill-would-block-iana-transition
I’ll tell you what, D., although I did just enjoy this read over at medium.com, when the author got to his “Pro/Con List” and said “- The principle of the matter” as one of the cons in his saga – I’m thinking yowsa, that’s pretty nasty! As in warped, upside down, all 100% backwards. It’s the other way around – he’s the one who got the super big break by only having to pay a small amount over his first offer and also avoid giving equity while trying to strong arm the other side into parting with it to begin with. The principle of the matter? Just what principle is that? Ouch. Just goes to show you how people’s attitudes are often so wrong when it comes to these extremely valuable assets.
Domenclature.com
Hello John,
Thank you, yes I do remember your inputs.
On the medium article, that post has significance in all current issues, including the new gTLDs, all coming under alternate gTLDs; it is now abundantly clear that the start-ups that use anything beside dot com are either ignorant, or foolish.
That article has got to be the MOST IMPORTANT one of the year. No doubt about it.
It’s unsolicited, it’s from serious business minds, it’s from actual end-user, unwittingly talking about everything we’ve been debating this year. It’s a confirmation of Schwartz’s theories, a confirmation of my maths, a confirmation of Overstock. com’s experience; it makes it empirical. Again.
I will wait to see how Rick handles it.
This is the BIGGEST DEAL ever. The new gTLD people will weep after reading this article. If .CO is considered a “hack’s” extension, notwithstanding all of dot co’s accomplishments, then what are the new gTLDs?
This is a developing story…
Thanks again, John.
Jeff Schneider
jeff schneider
Independent Marketing Analyst/Strategist at UseBiz.com / (.COM ) URL Centric Marketing
Top Contributor
Thats quite interesting. This is a historical, if not a precedence setting, statement of war by Google.
Jeff Schneider
Google backs Derivative GTLDs ,with monopoly type Big Money, Domain Bloggers were way ahead of Google 20 years ago and still are skeptical of a Google ploy to set back the clocks in order to finally be right?.
Or – “_ Steve Ballmer On Innovation. A great team, great energy and great hard work will never make up for a bad idea. IBD
Jeff Schneider
Hello Rick,
If you believe Steve Ballmer dump Google Stock.
Gratefully, Jeff Schneider (Contact Group) (Metal Tiger) (Domain Master)
Jeff Schneider
Hello Rick,
The Domainer Blogs other than yours are running scared and censoring comments at a quickening pace.Most if not all are Google developers basesd and rely heavily on Googles GTLD based ad system for their survival. How things have changed. Google is on Global notice and collecting more anticompetitive PR than any other company Online.
Gratefully, Jeff Schneider (Contact Group) (Metal Tiger) (Domain Master)