Morning Folks!!
There are myths in business that have been busted wide open over the years. I have empirical evidence. Not theory. I can point to things I have pointed to for decades because they are solid in the results they have proved over that time. I can calibrate the future for 40 years by the 2 simple myths below.
Myth #1. If I deliver food or pizza to people fewer people will come to my restaurant to eat.
So that is a myth and the thinking behind it is flawed. Here is the fact:
If you deliver you increase your pool of customers. You increase sales, profits and you expand. Your dining room gets fuller and you fulfill a NEED when they don't feel like leaving the comfort of their home. Now you can argue, but it won't make you right. I have 40 years of challenges and that baby still stands and your dog won't hunt. But some dinosaurs still think that way.
Where did those new folks come from? Some would want you to believe they came from your own dining room. That you split your customer base. Sorry, wrong answer. It increases people who are interested in your restaurant overall and maybe from a larger area and your customer base grows from the outside with new business. A rising tide.
Myth # 2. If I have a restaurant and a guy opens up a restaurant across the street he will take half my business.
Wrong! He might DOUBLE your business.
So let me point to real world example in Dallas Texas and Restaurant Row that was created in the mid 1970's. At the time there was one restaurant named "Old San Francisco" and it was one of my favorites. There was a bowling alley across the street. They were busy. They did fine. But then they opened up some 20-30 other large restaurants all right next to each other on the same street. Some thought they would go out of business because of the competition. In fact, you had to call Old San Francisco 1-2 weeks in advance to get in the door. See 30 restaurants and 30 restaurants advertising the same basic address and same basic product.
They were all good restaurants and they added VALUE by bringing all those people together looking for the same things and they all did well. They do that with auto malls. More PROOF! Not emotion. Facts. Proof. Historical evidence. Empirical evidence. How about malls themselves? How about "World Trade Centers"? They bring competitors together to do MORE BUSINESS in a faster amount of time!
That is why I can be certain that whatever happens in .whateverville, it can ONLY HELP .com. PERIOD!!! NO QUESTION!! NONE!! NONE!!!
Now if you have shit domains you are screwed but you were screwed with or without the new gtld's because you have crap.
Here is what the debate should look like if you want to have legitimacy with gTLD. Talk about specific .whatevers only.
There could be a market for .app or .blog or .web or a FEW others. I talk about dying on the vine. Look how many have died before it even germinates let alone making it to the vine. Many abandoning what they were going after and doing it early on in the process.
No emotions, just facts. Hundreds of horses at the gate and while you may want to talk about the race track itself or even the other horses, none of that matters. What matters is your horse and your stable. So if you tell me how bad the other guys stable is, most folks get turned off and walk away whether they say something or not. We all need to hear benefits of your horse. Why your horse can win. It has little to do with the others losing. It has to do with you winning.
So my horse is better because yours is an old nag won't hunt. That ain't selling
My horse does the quarter in 3 seconds faster than any other horse in the race will hunt. That IS selling.
One emotional one factual. Facts make points. Emotions don't. Unless you are gullible.
Everyone reading this is open to make millions. Everyone reading this is open to the next opportunity. Most are open to .whatever including me. But together there are 1400 "Franchises" coming out that will likely be grouped together in one way or another and a stumble by one can bring down many. I write about those pitfalls to alert and help those on that trail. I simply believe many are unprepared and unrealistic about what is to come, the headwinds they face and the surprises they face.
Sales is easy when you have a product everyone needs. When you are in a crowded field of products most don't need, its gonna be ugly for 1390 or 1400 of them.
The future holds ever single answer. But so does the past!
Rick Schwartz
Scott Alliy
“They do that with auto malls” Centralized access to like products / services, We have used the proven successful strategy for years on our training search engine.
This brings up a great question.
Will the new registrars divide and conquer themselves or will they consider leasing prime space in the GTLDmall dotcom (of course) ;-)
The dotcom importance to the GTLD program BTW is another post but truth is all doors to GTLD registrations will go thru some dotcom. In other words prime GTLD registration and services dotcoms have risen in value (although most don’t know it yet). Trials, tribulation, fumbles and follies, doubts, hopes and yes speculation, strong opinion (some based on more facts than others) and terse debate. I’m no historian but I’m guessing the gold rush had many similarities to what is happening with the GTLD program.
BTW Rick, I hope you visited URCooks.com while in Dallas. Pick your own meat from the freezer and cook it yourself dining. Good memories of Dallas trips.
Bogdan
The analogy is so profound!!
I think Verisign should send you a present or something to thank you.
Jonathan L
Brilliant !
steve cheatham
Good one Rick.
I have noticed auto dealers do it over the years but they also pushed together by zoning laws. Tourists rows like restaurant row work like that.Sometimes revitalizing a neighborhood does it. It’s called synergy.
Anyway…dot com rules!
BullS
One attorney in town will never make it, attorney needs their own species to survive.
That why they are called sharks.
Jeff Schneider
Hello Rick,
The Internets Foundational Pool of Addresses is being flooded with money.
If you own a Commercial Ship that carries most of the payload you will be payed handsomely for that vessel, and even more hansomely if it is a superior Revenue Carrier, Class Ship.
Gratefully, Jeff Schneider (Contact Group) (Metal Tiger)
UFO
One interesting point though is thing the best TLD strings could face a very difficult legal environment imho. Anyone that knows anything about dealing with larger corporates esp on IP and their brand knows they seriously get their lawyers involved.
If someone is using say flynow.com and had common law use and brand awareness will have a good basis in law to stop fly.now as it creates confusion etc etc.
Another legal issue, is this extortion racket associated with ‘sunrise’ defensive registrations. ICANN could have easily made a directive that registries simply disable URLs that have trademarks associated with them, but there seems an almost conspiracy to extort value from trademark holders to line the pockets of ICANN and registries. I’m surprised some enterprising attorney hasn’t filed a class action against all registries and ICANN for recovery of all these registration costs.
Rick Schwartz
I think it will be a legal hornets nest. Some gtlds may have a sack full of lawsuits and injunctions waiting for them once their doors open.
Brad Miller
Ive heard many times that there will be a flight to quality, and I agree. I think .NET has a lot to gain with the introduction of gTLDs. .NET has mindshare of internet users, and is significantly better than many of the new gTLDs. I see quantity of unregistered .net that could be good long-term investments, and premium .NETs can be acquired at good values.
I like ccTLDs too – you see them being adopted and developed internationally, I think .US has potential.
Patrick Hipskind
Every week you seldom see a .net in the top twenty on the sales chart on DNJournal.com. I don’t know of any .co that has sold for more than 10% of the valuation of the same domain name in the .com extension. Sex.com is a built out website while sex.co is a parked page, which is indicative of lower valuations for other extensions.
Valuation is the true measure of value. The valuation of a domain name versus its .com counterpart is a good metric to use when determining what gTLDs to take a chance on as a domain name investor. In 3 to 5 years the .web extension may be 10% to 15% of the value of the .com extension. As a domain investor you could make some good flips with that extension. The other gTLDs are most likely to be only 1% of the value of the .com or less, and making your money back would be more like flipping pancakes than flipping domains.
Ramahn
Because of all the noise, the only thing the new gtlds will do is bring more awareness to the domain name market, which will create more demand for domain names in general. Some will want .org, some .com, others .net or maybe .me…but the demand/desire for the .dumb and .makesnosense will be about zero.
Have you actually looked at the list. Tons of extensions in the singular when they should have been plural. A lot of them way too long. A lot are just plain stupid (.dot?? .Today? .blackfriday .xzy? .mov?) its just ridiculous. Then you have .confusion and .clustercraps waiting up happen in .pics v .pictures v .photo v .photography .mail v .email .cam v .camera. .mov v .movie v .film
Who will stand out? The standard= .com
Max Metal
What about gas stations, Steve? They do it also, but that’s not because of zoning.
Even clothing stores in malls because people like to shop more than one store for clothes.
UFO
@Patrick Hipskind
Agreed sort of. The best TLDs on and bunch of basis are 3 char extensions. (Legal, memorable, length).
I think .web could replace .net as a general commercial web extension at least in terms of market value.
One thing that people in the US don’t get as much is that cctlds are very important in host nations. Good cctlds are still actually quite cheap.
My guess is great .com’s will continue to skyrocket because all the emerging big players in BRIC nations will want English speaking keywords to front their brands.. and new brands. So there is more and more competition for the best .com’s. .com is the global standard and is a mark of true global scale. The worlds biggest corporates etc are not going to migrate to anything else.
To make any money on .web it would have to be single words and maybe 2 words if they are sitting on a high value vertical. All the other TLDs will crash and burn as investments for domainers. I like .shop but that will be a closed.shop and probably too expensive to buy even if available “to buy”.
Logan Flatt
Rick,
It’s a bad analogy — the Old San Francisco Steakhouse closed some years ago and the area is now derelict (it always was a little dodgy anyway).
Which makes me want to revisit the analogy — what’s to say that in five or ten years’ time all of our .com domain names will be worthless due to a complete lack of a need for domain names? Why won’t we all be talking into a mobile or wearable device, asking questions of it, and the talking bot goes away to find the answer on the web and then comes back to voice the answer to us? Won’t the use of domain names simply be too laborious to us by then?
Logan
in Dallas
Rick Schwartz
“the area is now derelict”
And so is .mobi.
Difference is one had a 30 year run and one had a 30 week run.
As far as “what’s to say”
Well, what’s to say it won’t?
An address is an address.
Kassey
How about the possibility of .brand replacing .com as the main site of major corporations, in the long run? Why is it not included in this important discussion?
Logan Flatt
Yes, but the entities using the address may only be bots, not actual human beings with money in their pockets/bank accounts.
Why in five to ten years’ time would we humans waste our time typing in a domain name into our browsers or typing in a search query at a search engine, looking over 10 to 15 results on Page One, looking at which result had an authoritative domain name, and then clicking to find an answer when we could simply state our query to our device and wait for an intelligent bot to do all the work and come back with the best answer available to it? If in the future it’s mostly a bot using the domain name to see if the content published at the domain name holds the best answer, we’re in trouble as investors, regardless if it’s .com, .net., .org, .smellyshoe, or .whatever.
I ask this as an investor trying to assess the potential risk of my ongoing attempts to invest thousands of dollars in one-word and/or yellow-page-category .com domain names. What could go wrong with domain names as an asset class?
UFO
‘@Kassey – How about the possibility of .brand replacing .com as the main site of major corporations, in the long run? Why is it not included in this important discussion?’
What will happen as I see it. large corporations will use these new TLDs as their identity. But they’ll have to be large to justify all the run costs attached. All these corporations will already own the .com so that will remain as their main ‘homepage’ and the new TLD brand will be used for marketing. In effect it will replace the backslash.
Take a bank such as ANZ.com
It can migrate to .anz and all its investment products will be like pension.anz and so forth. But the home page will be ANZ.com and will remain on all their important documentation. Advertising that is targeted may well go for pension.anz etc BUT the issue becomes whether customers actually understand it as a URL and simply type in pension.anz.com which will direct them to pension.anz and so the customer won’t learn.
‘Domainers’ with cash could in theory start closing out and making huge profits by owning generic TLDs that major corporates may want in the future, like say .anz but on a legal confusion basis they may regret owning that TLD because major corporates don’t mess about.
So I don’t see .com being replaced because large corporates will simply use these new TLDs in conjunction with .com and not a replacement for.
Ramahn
@Logan, we are already there my man. Google is the “bot”. Also, siri hasn’t given me any indication that domains will become worthless.
What I wonder is how “things” will be addressed in the IoT. How will that network look like and how will it impact domain names as we know it.
Also, what about ads. Advertisers need to direct the consumer….somewhere.
UFO
@Ramahn
Right on. Just because a bot can retrieve information it will only hone peoples search before they actually look at the site/product itself. Google is the bot and the search index is the output. People can always click the ‘I’m feeling lucky’ and get googles best answer.
Its a bit like the notion that shopping is now ‘dead’ and everything will be online, well no, things will just read just with shopping becoming part of leisure and those things that don’t sell as well on the net becoming more expensive to pay for the floor space.
After quite a bit of thought I’m now moving a bit more towards TLDs, as I see the biggest of corporates like say Shell (Oil company), owing .shell with their main homepage sitting on shell.shell
All the corporates that can’t afford or don’t want the hassle or don’t need the marketing credibility will still sit with the .com which will still be huge and all the BRIC companies looking for .com’s will easily fill the void (and that those .com’s that say the likes of Shell own will simply be rolled up and retained).
The flow on from all this will lead to the deprecation of everything below .com. Global giants on their own TLD, SME’s on .com and the great unwashed on .web and .net etc.
My belief is the lead in all this will be the super marketing companies first like say .Nike as any spillage won’t matter and they have something to gain (They can also run subdomains to get the mistypes to shoes.nike.com instead of shoes.nike). Then we’ll start getting the other super multinationals following over time. It will take 20 years AND all these companies will have already acquired the .com’s for their name so it has NO effect on domain names. All the generic TLDs will be so dispersed in their take up and development it will only be at that 20 year mark they will have any noticeable impact… and in non commercial areas i.e. in areas that have no real value for domain owners.
Today = 0
.Nike use = +5 years
.multinational brands = +10 years
.public awareness and general recollection = +20 years
People need to realise that any adoption of a TLD as a corporate identity needs to be rolled out and that won’t happen overnight. Loads of corporates drag the chain on lots of IT things, how many are still running XP…loads.
Anita
The Offspring:
While the debates been raging, and I’ve been dwelling on it for hours across the timeline, I feel I’ve finally found some sort of answer to all the questions in my head. Might or might not make sense to others.
I seriously doubted if any domain can even hypothetically replace .COM usage for businesses due to the existing “in use” and “with no need to change” millions of .COM/.ORG and CCTLD domains. I also had my doubts if the usage of the .brand will be popular except for internal use if at all.
One of my conclusions from all the debates was that right now all the practical usage of the new GTLDs seem to lie with marketing and personalization. For example I see the use of “nike.shoes” as a possibility for marketing and for url shortening instead of http://www.nike.com/shoes or “shoes.nike” which me thinks makes lesser sense. I also saw companies vying to buy the likes of running.shoes and walking.shoes and a possibility of runningshoes.com and walkingshoes.com become viable brands (haven’t checked who owns these but just hypothesizing to convey the idea).
So I continued thinking and thought some more about how all these seemingly contradictory opinions by stalwarts like Rick and Frank can make sense. Bingo, suddenly the clouds cleared a bit; What if eventually all of these domains fit in like a family?
Dad -> .COM or .ORG
Mom -> .Brand or CCTLDs
Kids -> brand.category like brand.shoes or brand.socks or running.shoes
More domains for companies to manage but a place for everyone and a probable answer to Rick’s “need” and “want” question.
What say ya’all?
Danny Pryor
This line made me laugh pretty hard, “Now if you have shit domains you are screwed but you were screwed with or without the new gtld’s because you have crap.”
So, those folks, who have the crap, will never hear this argument anyway. But is was quite courteous of you to think of them. Just in case. LOL!