Morning Folks!!
So my post yesterday morning is inadequate. It touches what I see, but it is oh so much bigger. It is the collective energy that is coming and WE are the BIG winners! 1000 NEW Divisions if not separate companies. They are going to make a LOT of NOISE!!
They are going to make noise in many ways. Some of it will be just that, noise. But thru that noise there will be some that have something or their something may benefit your .com as I have described here.
There is a TIDAL WAVE coming and it is going to make a direct hit on the domain industry. If it does not keep getting delayed. Each day of delay makes a company weaker not stronger. It costs money not to sell anything. But at some point that dam is gonna BURST and when it does, the landscape will never look the same again.
Bringing in Adam Dicker to help with T.R.A.F.F.I.C. is by design. We are preparing for what is to come. We have 2 venues capable of holding THOUSANDS of attendees. Besides the current domain investors an entire new generation of domain investors are all heading this way. The competition is going to be very interesting and it will be fierce and it will heat up from there. A lot of elbows in a small industry as this "Experiment" progresses.
So you are seeing the calm before the storm. And the only reason there is calm is because of the clusterf*ck that is delaying everything. In a perfect world you certainly would want to roll things out very soon. But looks like the delay will extend into 2014. I really do enjoy watching incompetence up close. Somethings are not well thought out and when that happens it blows up in their face. How could you not see this clusterf*ck 2 years away? I think I have been writing about it for 2 years and am glad others now see that there is no other word in the English language to describe it.
But after the clusterf*ck, IF we EVER get to that point, then things are going to move very fast and the $$$ are going to fly! It will look like 2005 on steroids. This IS the calm before the storm and to be honest, the calm has a lot of things bubbling and brewing below the surface.
All I want to make perfectly clear is anyone reading this scared that their .com values are going to go down are not paying attention and are already reacting to noise that means nothing. Now WHY am I spending so much energy writing about this NOW? Because when the flood gates open, my voice will be drowned out by THOUSANDS of others. I need to be CLEARLY on record. If I stay true to what I see, I am also likely to have an entire new generation of people who don't like me. Sorry if my thoughts and vision does not match their agenda. REALITY trumps everything. Let the chips fall where they may and I am rooting for soe successes out there. The NOISE won't make them a success. END USERS, CONTENT and DOMAIN INVESTORS will decide their fate. MANY of those extensions may actually SNUB the domain industry thinking they can make their mark solely with end users. Good luck with that strategy.
I think the biggest unknown is how many extensions will collapse or be acquired before they collapse?
That said....I wish every new gTLD the greatest of successes. Your success is our success. Even if only 1 in 1000 works, the folks reading this blog will be on it. I won't hide which, if any, I think have a chance. The birdie in the mine for me is .web. I like .web but it could easily prove to be another .net. Should that happen, many others will simply collpase. And anyone that gets a .whatever and has a success and you own the .com version, you too have a success. It's coming!
Rick Schwartz
Martin
LOVE THE NEW PIC!! A suit and tie !!!
Coppell
Good post Rick, but I think .web will just be another dud, just like .mobi.
Would have had a chance if introduced back in the early 1990’s, but it is way too late now. If the demand for such a concept truly existed, .net would have taken off larger than it has.
Observer
A barbershop owner will definitely need pictures to decorate the walls of his/her shop. He/She does not need original works of Picasso or Munch for the purpose. There will be some barbershop demand for some whatsoevers. Web may be one of them.
JBS
I don’t think .web can even catch up to .biz. It will be getting too much competition from .xyz… LOL
Scott Alliy
whether dotcom or .whatever you have to have something to sell something. You don’t set up the party after the guests arrive … do you? So the people that have good dots should hold and wait and those that have been considering investing … well this is not rocket science… buy good names for low prices now and sell high later or don’t buy now and wish you had of bought now, later. For savvy investors “These are the days that will someday soon be “Those were the days” Thoughts worth thinking today.
JBS
Straight from the King: But after the clusterf*ck, IF we EVER get to that point, then things are going to move very fast and the $$$ are going to fly! It will look like 2005 on steroids.
Re: Scott Alliy “These are the days that will someday soon be “Those were the days”
I agree – anyone looking to invest serious cash should obtain at least one top tier dot com, while many are really under priced, over a bunch of .whatever gambles…
Dr Domainer
I agree it’s going to be so huge and the top domainers are going to have
to hire a team to handle all the leads.
I believe this is going to be a bigger boom than the dot com boom years ago.
5 years time 70% of people will know the job title Domainer.
Do you know any other business that’s had so many businesses build around them giving them profitable business leads for free!!
Premium .coms are going to turn into business bee hives. When we go to collect the (MONEY HONEY) they will try to STING but we will have our domain beekeeping suits on. LOVE IT!! LOVE IT!! LOVE IT!!
Get ready for the never ending magic carpet ride.
Jonathan
I like this reality check:
Door-to-door sales have helped Go Daddy grow its Indian business by 86% That is 1.5b people that speak Hindi & English 85% yet to come online. The futures bright the dye is “cast” for the .com.
Rich
So what if .web will be another .net?
We all seen a lot of .net’s selling for 5,6 figure
What is wrong in investing $30 and later sell a .web for 3k- 200k? Frank sold Lottery.Net for $220,000 what is wrong with that?
Ok let’s not go to the extreme.
Let’s look at the last Sedo sales:
fab.net 39,000
greentea.net 10,000
tommygun.net 7800
You guys just don’t see the picture.
i WILL invest in .web
Rick Schwartz
It’s not a knock on .net. I know how to do that when needed.
It is illustrating the uphill battle the other extensions will have because .web has the best chance to breakout.
So if .web goes down, there are going to be as many as 999 right behind them with the same fate.
You can always find examples of sales. Want to know how many .nets are for sale and nobody wants and have very little value?
.web is the most universal. But unless they can get over the hurldle of Need, want and desire the others will have an even harder time for the most part.
It could end up as a .biz. WE won’t be the ones that decide that. If only domainers buy, then there is no real market. Tulips.
.com s valuable because MOST businesses use that extension. The fortune 1000.
Nobody knows, but we do have past evidence and behavior to judge things by and each day new info will come to light.
Reality will dictate.
Scott Alliy
Well said Rick, “But unless they can get over the hurdle of Need, want and desire the others will have an even harder time for the most part” Too often we forget that the product is ours but the decision is the consumers. We have done what we have done by investing in commodities called domain names. Now it is up to each of us, in fact imperative for each of us to help bring the awareness and education to end users. Helping them see the light aka benefits they will receive by buying one or more premium relevant domain names.
Louise
So, dot web is the birdy in the mine? I researched 3 of your articles to try to find out what the birdy in the mine is!
I like dot web. There is a strong backlash against “squatted” conventional dot com, is why startups turn to made-up brandables, such as featured on BrandBucket, and alternative extensions, such as io and tv . . . It’s like people who want to start businesses have a solidarity against domain investors, often labeling them, squatters . . . Meaningful one-word, top tier dot com will always be in demand . . . yet, made-up, catchy brandables and ccTLDs like the one you sold, Meet.me, seem to take their place alongside them, ahead of conventional two-word meaningful dot coms and one-word dot nets.
Rick Schwartz
Louise,
Canaries were once regularly used in coal mining as an early warning system. Toxic gases such as carbon monoxide, methane or carbon dioxide in the mine would kill the bird before affecting the miners. Signs of distress from the bird indicated to the miners that conditions were unsafe. The use of miners’ canaries in British mines was phased out in 1987.
The phrase “canary in a coal mine” is frequently used to refer to a person or thing which serves as an early warning of a coming crisis. By analogy, the term climate canary is used to refer to a species that is affected by an environmental danger prior to other species, thus serving as an early warning system for the other species with regard to the danger.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_Canary
Does it make more sense now and why I use that phrase from another era?
Patrick Hipskind
The geo gTLD’s are targeted to a large market, and each of those markets are worth billions of dollars. They will be successful. After spending hundreds of hours researching and acquiring .la domain names, exact match domains with over 40,000 exact global monthly searches are pretty much all registered. High quality websites, however, are not being built yet. Beat.la is one of the few, and that was launched by the Phoenix Suns.
If this is any indication of what is to come, the gTLD program is heading for an iceberg and it will be called the Titanic. Unless each domain name extension gets quality websites built on the best the domain names of the extension, their value will remain low in the marketplace and investors will not want to incur the cost of renewing the domain names. Renewal fees won’t get paid by parking alone and without quality websites being built on the best domain names of the extension, you aren’t going to be able to resell the domain names for a decent ROI. The delay in the use of the domain names will have a profound effect on those gTLDs launching at a later date.
Patrick Hipskind
The whole gTLD program is going to be a massive bottleneck. Too much supply and not enough demand.
UFO
These new tlds will take away buyer demand for second grade .com’s. So they WILL fall in value. The barrier cost to changing domain names once you’ve got the website, email addresses, publishing/advertising costs etc will ensure that small businesses when they set up on a non .com WON’T change back over to the .com.
What is going to happen is small businesses are going to get these new domains for free if they get some webhosting etc etc or whatever, and once locked in over time they’ll get screwed over for more cash, its always how its worked and how it will work this time.
So, top quality will be at the apex of a more diverse pyramid, second/third grade .com’s will become far less valuable. (Under 5k ones).
JBS
Re: These new tlds will take away buyer demand for second grade .com’s. So they WILL fall in value.
I loosely agree with the statement (for a period of time) but don’t consider the effected second / third grade dot coms as being those under 5K. More like many domains under $500 might fall in value until the clusterf*ck unravels. There are many, many low 4 figure dot coms that are only going to go up in demand and value. But the new gTLDs are going to look very attractive to many buyers with garbage phrase leftover dot coms. Unfortunately, it will prove to be fool’s gold for them.
UFO
It doesn’t take much logic to work out all the domain names available verses the potential websites required, to see that it all doesn’t stack up.
If anything more businesses are clustering towards shared URLs with prebuilt functionality. Like using facebook, but more importantly like on EBay and Amazon which could in theory if they changed their models slightly soak up even more businesses.
I personally think the whole concept of trying to buy new URLs to make some supernormal profit is just bunk for the risks. Its like IPOs where all the value is pretaken by the sponsors.
Perhaps domainers could form a cooperative and act as underwriters for a domain extension that they’d all back and buy domains in. But the biggest problem with domainers is the value that they make is driven by developers and therefore adoption by the general public.
I do think over time the only thing that will matter is recollection, a 2 word domain on a .com is harder to remember than a 1 word domain on the second word as an TLD. So many people use SE’s now that if they can’t get what they want by recollection then they’ll get it by a search. And most businesses etc are geo located etc etc, so its nonsense to suggest they leak as much business as has been banded about through confusion etc.
steve
Ya but the old pic was iconic. This pic is better …..but yet worse as we won’t see that familiar old smile anymore.