Morning Folks!
2 Years ago there were more new GTLD registrations then there are now. 2 years of gains wiped out and that is during a time that hundreds of them were released for the first time. Numbers should be skyrocketing but they are not. They are crashing and they are crashing very badly.
On June 22, 2016 there were 22,654,036 new GTLDs registered on the way to a high of 29,470,568 on April 13th 2017. Since then, it's been almost all down hill. As I write this today, the number stands at 22,674,069. A TOTAL of 33 domain increase over 2 YEARS and now we have over 1 million still to drop. We have 2 days left before it's exactly 2 years.
22,654,036 on 6/22/16
29,470,568 on 4/13/17
22,674,069 TODAY (with 1,072,036 to be deleted)
Registries made money. Registrars made money. Domain investors lost their asses and continue to get financially hurt! Every day that passes most get weaker as renewals never take a day off.
Whatever your nut is, be sure to multiply it out by 10 YEARS! That's the real carrying cost. 20 50 years if you are smart.
The chart below tells the sad story. And that's with all the pumping and dumping and domain shows that are only held to prop up GTLD's. They have turned into Registry and Registrar shows for new GTLD's. Domain investors be damned. None of this is in YOUR best interest. It's in THEIR best interest. So they told you black is white until you swallowed it. Hook, line and sinker and guess what? What Many/MOST have now are BILLS not ASSETS! It's 5 years. It's not looking good!
Even Favorites like .Club are down 20% and more from their top level and their growth looks to be over as they struggle to maintain 1 million registrations. 14% of their entire registration base is about to be deleted. That's over 145,000 names and that will drop them to about 860,000 registrations from a high of 1.3 Million. That's about 35% of ALL their registrations and EVERY ONE is a domainer that lost money!
Even with TWO Triple Crown Winners in 3 years .Horse struggles as one of the worst performing New GTLD's with 2300 registrations in FOUR YEARS!
So many others are simply DYING ON THE VINE! A term I have used for 5 years. Now you see why.
Domainers looking for the next coming are just being foolish. And the CRAP they register is just sad! They are chasing yesterday and not tomorrow.
Win, Place, Show. There COULD be up to 3 winners. But that means there will be 997 losers. 997 .Mobi's. Speaking of .Mobi, Estibot estimates my holdings that are worth $0 are actually worth $179k. LOLOL! But I have GREAT keywords! Guess what?? It is MEANINGLESS!
GreatKeyword.DumbGTLD = NOTHING!
GreatKeyword.Com = $$$$$$
One plants a bad seed hoping to sprout and it won't. The other buys someone else's thriving plant and it continues to thrive and grow.
GTLD's = SQUARE WHEELS!
The poor (and i mean poor) GTLD guys refuse to read what was predicted YEARS ago and memorialized and see how it dovetails with reality today. They refuse to recalibrate given new information. They are in way too deep. They are angry, frustrated and BROKE! Worst of all, they WASTED 5 YEARS of their lives on a bag of smoke when they could have actually made money with something tried and true. So they reinvented a square wheel that nobody wants. Especially end users.
So they said it was for startups. Well I would beg to differ. The best way to put a startup out of business is with a beautiful brand new GTLD that nobody ever heard of including MOST domainers.
When you see tens or hundreds of thousands of registrations and Godaddy has just 1000 of them, it's a really good chance it's a LOSER! If Godaddy is not the #1 registrar of any GTLD, you got a loser. I won't mention the names of the registries to be careful of. But you should be able to figure it out if you do your homework and research.
Domainers got lied to. They got fooled. They swallowed ever piece of shit that was fed to them by people with a motive. These folks have their minions that they use as their LOUD mouthpieces. They make up press releases and distribute them as fact. As news. As something important. Why not label it the advertising it actually is and charge to publish? I am sent stuff all the time. It seldom if EVER gets posted here. Glad so many others are willing to carry their water. I don't think they serve their readers very well and many censor negative viewpoints when it affects their agenda to begin with.
Independent voices are shut down, shot down and minimized regardless of the evidence at hand. And I still see the other side and look for it in the wild. I am even willing to post a picture of one in the wild. But if you don't ask the question: How much traffic do I lose to the .com" you are a schmuck that would rather ignore reality. There is a loss. There is a number. You MUST put a number if you don't want to fool yourself. Then of course you tell me about search. SCREW SEARCH!
Here is how many people see your url. On a BILLBORD. In a MAGAZINE. Advertised on TV or RADIO. Only a total techie fool would IGNORE those mediums. And don't forget Word of Mouth. The one below was in blacked out windows. So you have BostonSeaport.xyz. Does anyone really believe there is no leakage to .com?? Really? If you do, let me tell you one thing, you could not be any wronger and that means EVERYTHING gets filtered thru something based on hope not fact. Put a number on it. It's bigger than you think!! It's not 1%. Or 2% or even 20%. But keep fooling yourself into believing whatever you want. I guarantee that BostonSeaport.com is getting a lot of free and potentially targeted traffic.
Have a GREAT Day!
Rick Schwartz
Michael Anthony Castello
Rick, the current situation with new gTLDs was exacerbated by many factors, most of which were the bad decisions by those in charge of creating them. In my opinion, ICANN and Fadi Chehadé had a “to hell with the rest of you” attitude with regards to pushing through the hundreds of new extensions. Likewise, Google most likely understood what flooding the market would do to the DN System which makes web traffic more reliant on their gateway.
At some point I believe there could be good reason for “investors” to seek some kind of compensation from these major players. I raised these issues in this years 2018 DNjournal’s State Of the Industry: http://dnjournal.com/cover/2018/january-page2.htm
Net citizens habits are being directed away from domain names by those that want to control us and our data. The answer to this problem is controlling our own email, web presence and persona through domain names. As these major tech companies finally start to be reined in, our domain market will rise again like never before.
Rick Schwartz
Can’t disagree. I think you nailed a lot of it.
John
> “Likewise, Google […] I raised these issues in this years 2018 DNjournal’s State Of the Industry”
Just read it. Nice work. So nice to see someone else speaking up on those 8,000 tons gorillas in the room. :)
> “Net citizens habits are being directed away from domain names by those that want to control us and our data. The answer to this problem is controlling our own email, web presence and persona through domain names. As these major tech companies finally start to be reined in”
Love it. The dumbing down of society and most especially the US where I live is so vast and so shocking that people in general scarcely even know what domain names are anymore. They know *less* than they did in the 1990’s. And without question, totally by design, courtesy of the mighty PTB…
John
I skimmed over a bit, but more or less could not agree more with Rick here. I feel his post is also consistent with what I say about them too. Mostly a loss and a waste, with some rare exceptions. Home.Loans – yes, and more like them, but doesn’t change the overall reality. I’ve already dropped a few I even paid mid $xxx and low $x,xxx for in early release – dead weight, not worth keeping any more, nothing but a bill as Rick has said. Fortunately I did very little at that level of cost, too. But am I keeping ones I still consider the best of the best? You bet I am, both for end use and potential resale later, but primarily for end use now. And I use them.
To summarize: the best of the best rare new exceptions are certainly good and valuable, mostly in the form of whole SLD/TLD domain names only vs. whole TLDs imo, and also no threat to .com at all. They even tend to accentuate the value of good .coms rather than the opposite as far as I’m concerned. The overwhelmingly vast majority of whole TLD’s or SLD + TLD combinations, however – worthless. My Harvard Law friend suggested many years ago that domain names weren’t worth much because they were “infinitely expandable” as he put it, i.e. envisioning the day of limitless TLDs, and he was wrong. The “money grab” model of release also didn’t exactly help the cause.
And now, the real enemy of domain names:
In light of what Michael posted above, this is also another perfect time and place to post this important material, which I consider to be mandatory reading and viewing for all domainers and domain investors worldwide:
• “Google – One of the Largest Monopolies in the World”
• https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2018/06/16/google-one-of-the-largest-monopolies.aspx
Mark Thorpe
So true:
“These folks have their minions that they use as their LOUD mouthpieces. They make up press releases and distribute them as fact. As news. As something important. Why not label it the advertising it actually is and charge to publish?”
Minions and loud mouthpieces, perfect description. The “Gang”.
domainguy
well the lucky owner of vacation.rentals spent 500k and toots his horn what a great deal he got! How about an interview with the owner of vacationrentals.com to juxtapose this confused owner. This would be a 500k real life comparison. This way everyone could learn from this mistake! We learn from history as information continues to come in! Love this article rick…I laughed so hard!!
MapleDots
I have an example
Billboard
Vacation.Rentals on a billboard
Means nothing to the common person until you do this…
http://www.Vacation.Rentals
And even then you run the risk of average joe adding a .com
John
Not to push new gTLDs, which I don’t, but how long do you think that can last before people sufficiently catch on?
MapleDots
Now that I see this in print again it also looks like a subdomain for rentals. ie vacation being the subdomain for the word rental. very much like calendar.google.ca
Very confusing to ordinary joe.
Michael Kugler
MD, I have got to hand it to you.
I swear to you I am being 100% honest when I say this. Not 1 single month ago, I had the exact same scenario said to me with the exact same words. Call it an epiphany moment if you will. From that moment on, we began adding the “www” to the front of every place we mentioned Vacation.Rentals
It literally has caused our web traffic to explode upwards by 30%, no joke. Every single post, ad, link ensures that we list it as https://www.vacation.rentals
Wish we would have realized this 2 months prior.
Thought you would get a chuckle out of it.
John Colascione
Your wrong Rick on this one. Forget 20 years. It’s 50 years. 50 years till we see meaningful adoption. It’s a fifty year investment. But you won’t mind being wrong on this one.
Rick Schwartz
I stand corrected and made the update to the original post itself. ;-)
Snoopy
More likely that domains won’t exist rather than new tlds taking off. Some of these new tlds haven’t gotten any real traction in nearly 20 years, .biz,.info, .tv. Another 30 years won’t change anything.
Snoopy
There is one more innings. Who is ready to get bent over by Verisign with their .web?
Batterrrr rup!
Tyger Gilbert
You predicted this years ago when GTLDs first came out. I listened to you, and never registered one. Until just recently. I got TygerGilbert.photography. Of course, I have some personal interest in it. But still, I didn’t try to use it as my main domain for my photography gallery website and hope it would draw traffic. I used it as my domain on PhotoShelter, which is a photo gallery template site, and then linked to it from my TygerGilbert.com website. It’s easier to verbally direct people to the .com instead of the .photography domain, and much more likely they will remember it. Nobody understands what a GTLD is, really.
MapleDots
A waste of a good reg fee in my opinion.
If you wanted a more descriptive domain then TygerGilbertPhotography.com would have been a better choice. I registered a 3 word .com for one of my businesses and it says exactly what we are. I put it on the back bumper of a car and nothing more needed to be said. With TygerGilbert.com you still have to explain what it is and TygerGilbertPhotography.com is self explanatory. You can link the two and either gets you to the destination without the need for a confusing GTLD.
Tyger Gilbert
Hmm. Good point. I seem to remember .photography being about $6 cheaper because of some special at the time, but other than that, the longer .com would have been better in the long run. And that’s still an option. Thanks for the advice.
There’s probably a lot of people smacking their foreheads and saying, “Duh! I could have had a dot com!” Perhaps accounting for part of the reason the GTLDs are dying off now.
MapleDots
Yup,
I truly, truly do not understand how a 12 letter GTLD can even be launched (head scratch). Unless you have one of the few killer prefixes like wedding.photography it makes absolutely no sense.
Anyways, that is just my opinion and a .photo I could still see but like .website as opposed to .web it leaves me scratching my head every time.