Afternoon Folks!!
I wrote this a few days ago but decided not post it. Like over 150 others. Then this morning I read a blog post at TheDomains.com about how new blood in domaining thinks about old-time veterans like me. So here it is.
It's so easy for the know-nothings to dismiss us if we are "Old-timers" in the domain business even tho they are trying to replicate what we did. They frame it like us against them instead of experience vs. no experience. But the truth of the matter is they are the ones with Closed Minds and we are the ones with Experience. We just don't spit in the wind and think we invented rain! Bless their hearts!
So these folks will argue with you but they are all show. They have nothing concrete they can point to. Just hoping and wishing seems to be a strategy. They talk about keywords as the holy grail but when you point out that keyword.mobi is worthless and keyword.net is worth 1% of .com assuming you can even find a buyer. Keyword.crap is nothing new. Worth Less. Much Less.
We heard the same defensive arguments for every extension ever released. .TV, .Biz. .Mobi, .Info, .whogivesadamnshitabouttheextensionanywaysjustsomethingelsetoremember
They can't point to very much to support their argument except a few sales some of which are questionable with VERY flimsy evidence to support them. Seldom if ever their own sales.
GTLD's made a huge mistake the day they made it GTLD vs .Com. Good job Paul!! That was the day they lost. It should have been used as an aid to compliment but they decided to go head-on and guess what? It was a head-on collision and GTLD's not only LOST, it will be YEARS before they can mop up the mess.
There are 1000 newbies for every old timer. They make a lot of noise not a lot of money. Slap each other on the back while trying to emulate my 20 year plan even tho I tell them 100x their recipe is much different and won't work. The only similarity is the 20 years. But not many if any of them will survive that long. Why? Attitude, experience, cash flow.
You think they might be interested in what is different? Instead they can only resort to insults to bolster their arguments. That's funny! They have yet to learn to be skeptical. To be critical. To see who benefits when they buy into it. They are fish and they will bite on any bait. That means they lose. They are somebody else's TROPHY!
Meanwhile stupid old timers deal in Gold while the know-nothing geniuses corner the market on .horse.manure. Enjoy your .crap as you go broke! But I bet your $$$ would have gone further NOW had it still been in your wallet and not theirs.
So which keyword.mobi would you like to buy from me today? I will be happy to sell them to domainers. They are the only ones stupid enough to buy them. Bill.mobi, Cruises.mobi, Eat.mobi, Gossip.mobi, Celebs.mobi, LAUGH.mobi, Wow.mobi and MORONS.mobi. The ONLY thing they are good for is a TAX LOSS!! So anyone using the argument that keyword plus .crap means something, think again! Want some numerics? 975.mobi, 931.mobi, 517.mobi. They are all worthless and only a total fool would try and build their empire on this .crap.
Remember, NOBODY has to remember .com. It is synonymous with the Internet. Many commercials don't even NEED to put their .com on their commercials. But I don't recommend that. So there is no such thing as a ONE WORD .CRAP!! You will always have to remember 2 things and you will always have to put http://www.Crappy.Domains so people even recognize it as a url.And not a typo!
As long as folks will beat their chest with .crap.I will show them just how foolish they are! Not one of them would ever even DARE to read my posts from 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 where I lay it all out in detail.
The stampede is in full swing and the top gtld's are all PURE .CRAP! 33% of all new GTLD's are .Top which is CRAP, .Loan which is CRAP and .xyz which is CRAP! Enjoy your .crap sandwich. I have my own .crap as I have shown.
I have many non .com extensions. Many single keyword NON .com and you know how many offers I have gotten in 23 years? ONE! Just one! Early on when the .com was not available I would get .net. I sold men.com for $1.32MM, but have not gotten an offer for Men.net or Men.org. How about Ass.net? 3 letters, keyword. Traffic! Where are the offers? Where is the demand? There isn't ANY!!! Wake up! Want a perfect xxx keyword? How about xxx.sc? As a domainer I don't even know what .sc stands for. But I got a great keyword so it must be worth a fortune right?? Sorry, your keyword is a bogus argument if it does not end with .com. This is all KEY SHIT! Not KEY WORD! Deal with it!
How about a GREAT 2 letter domain? I got one. Never had an offer. Never got an email. NY.biz. You like Tits?? How about Tits.net? Which extension would you like me to show you something prime and also show you something that nobody wants? We have all been there and done that! Newbies will learn. Maybe not!
So the "Stampede" I talked about years ago should be visible to the naked eye now (except newbies). Extensions "DYING ON THE VINE" which I have also talked about many times is also now visible to the naked eye (except newbies). And domainers buying all this fools gold is also visible to the naked eye.(except newbies) What isn't visible is anyone acknowledging ANY of the pitfalls let alone 122 of them! They can't even look at it. They can't even talk about it. They, as so-called business people, can't even discuss it in a rational, logical, non-emotional way. They are too invested to allow new evidence or information to be part of anything. They did not ask the critical questions first. They can only dismiss it like whistling past a cemetery at midnight on a dark and rainy night! Good luck with that work ethic Mr. Newbie. And your next career will be??
Rick Schwartz
Auction.fyi
Hi,
A great post, as always, Rick!
I would like to sell my new Gs for reg fee. want my money back..
Kevin
See this is a good example of where the new domainers are going way off course>
Auction.fyi ??? 99.99999999999999% of Internet users have no clue what .fyi is. Even if you said its a new gTLD extension they would still look at you with the “what’s that” look.
A safer investment but still not guaranteed to generate an ROI one day would be Auction.Live. But even with that decent combo it still is a long long longshot.
The only way you can even begin to build a potential ROI on the Auction.Live example is to build a significant site and spend millions of dollars advertising and marketing it and pray you get a response and a successful website.
Auction.fyi
Hi Kevin,
Auction.FYI has renewal of $15.
Auction.Live – Registry Premium domain (min offer $5k) with insane renewal.
my portfolio: https://auction.fyi/brand-names/domains-for-sale/
Pepp
Rick, Why did you spend $200,000 on flowers.mobi?
OR was it a non sale after the show was over?
Rick Schwartz
I hope you are not questioning the authenticity of the sale then I would have to call you a STUPID DICK that should know better! But I doubt that is what you are saying.
.Mobi was the one of the first new extension many years ago. It was not released with 500 others.
Originally it was supposed to have a mobile benefit that became obsolete. And you had guys like Monte pumping it like we saw the pumping of the last few years. I and many other bought into it. I outbid live known bidders. Somebody bid $195k and $190k and there were multiple bidders OVER the $100k mark. It was speculation. I can afford to speculate. And I did and I proved it to be NFG! Others should have learned from MY MISTAKE. They chose not to. I went into the auction prepared to buy THAT domain and some know I was prepared to go to $100k before the auction even started. I identified that as the BEST domain for the mobile market which was just blossoming back then.
I lost $193,500. The only benefit was taking the tax deduction which was worth a LOT! The deduction was worth tens of thousands more than then the domain itself!
Lastly, I learn from my mistakes. I learn when I lose money. I don’t CHOOSE to remain DUMB and STUPID and play ostrich in face of growing evidence!
michael m todaro
that was actually a nice buy. if .mobi actually was working that way coulda ended up being worth 20 million dollars. it was a good gamble but like anything else, sometimes you win, sometimes you lost.
Sincere
Pepp probably wasn’t around back then. The internet was much slower back then. Mobile was the future and there was no such thing as responsive websites. You had to create two separate websites one for desktop one for mobile. The hype was that many major companies ( the biggest names in Telecom) we’re backing up . Mobi. It could have been that whatever it wasn’t about the name but the backers. I just want to add that it’s so sad when I see these posts are named Pros wear new share their new GT LTS and domain names and ask others not to criticize them. You would think they would want positive criticism. For the life of me these people are in another world. At the end of the day they need to look at their domain names and think how they will be used to benefit the person using them. The way they speak and communicate seems like they are bunch of kids that have just entered the industry, a most kids think they know it all only to learn as they get older differently.
Uknowledge
Thank you for your honesty,Rick.Wish people will accept the truth and learn from experienced minds like you .Someone makes a lucky sale and then assume new GTLD can match up with time which never happens .Thank you always and this is why,I respect you and love your 20 years plan which I am going to implement in my pricing and domain model.
Sigma
If anything, a few nGTLD registries will go under in the next 6-12 months depending on when the recession hits. This recession will come through like the Great Flood; sweeping 90% of nGTLDs away into the abyss. Who will be left standing when the music stops?
Travis
GTLDS were the biggest scam
Ever, and many in the industry are guilty of pumping them.
R P
The “not com revolution” marketing strategy was ill conceived to say the least.
First you have Warren Buffett as largest shareholder of Verisign (.com registry), so basically you are going to head to head with most successful investor in world. And ofcourse he pulls a fast one and acquires .web for protection.
Second, there was total lack of understanding of how costly/big of IT endeavor for large corp to migrate to a new root domain. Not just a simple find and replace.
Third, some of these niche new Gs could’ve been successful as complimentary domains used as forwards or small minisites. But they were marketed as a replacement for something that didn’t need replacing. .Com is the top tier, global brand. From Amazon.com to Google.com to Microsoft.com to Alibaba.com. If you are not .com than you are simply not a top tier, global brand online.
Logan
What Ricks says is true. We bought insurance.so and debtconsolidation.so in .so’s early access program years ago thinking how clever and smart we were to have gotten such great, expensive keywords in a new extension.
We renewed these for five years and never got any inquiry from any interested buyer. The domains never got any traffic of note.
We put BIN pricing on the landing pages of only $888 for over two years and nobody ever bought them. We finally let them drop. I don’t think anyone has registered them since we dropped them (and I don’t recommend anyone go register them either).
michael m todaro
so insurance.com $35 million, insurance.so under $35. very interesting.
John McCormac
One is a domain name with a business behind it and with a globally recognised TLD. The other is a keyword domain name in the Somalian ccTLD. The ccTLDs generally do not follow .COM dynamics on valuation.
MLi
Yep, let that fact sink into your thick brain.
BullS
The folks who know the truth aren’t talking. The ones who don’t have a clue, you can’t shut them up.
Anunt
Here is your first offer for ass.net
I will buy it for $1,000 USD
It’s not worth crap but i will take it from you for a $1,000.
Matt
I offer $1200
Anunt
$1201
I forgot
Words of wisdom thank you for sharing.
No Bulloney coming out of your mouth. all the best :D
Snoopy
.Club is terrible as well. It appears they are propping up the numbers with Chinese registrar HiChina (Alibaba Cloud Computing) who processed 80,000 registrations in couple of days last week and then volume quickly fell off a cliff. God knows how low the pricing is or what kind of promotion was done to move those names since the standard seems 99 cents at major places like Godaddy and that still isn’t cheap enough to prevent the shrinkage.
Without that Chinese registrar selling for god knows how a low a price .club numbers would be falling through the floor. .Club is on the low price rollercoaster where names gets dropped a year out in big quantities. That is a very hard train to get off without tanking numbers.
They got massive drops coming up (11.7% of the namespace) so perhaps expect that registrar to feature again soon.
Rick
Buy the BEST and forget the rest. This applies to most things in life, property, collectibles, domains. Also take shots if you are doing well!
All very successful people take shots and make mistakes.
Rick took a shot on .mobi. Good for him. If you are doing well do not eventually take tax losses then you are not aggressive enough.
We own F…Y…com. Paid 250K. This was when they finally started allow bad words. Many of you do not realize that many words were banned from registration for years.
What is it worth? Who cares? We took a shot, are going to lose sooner or later but we took a shot.
Have a good day!
Mike
Hi,
I am enjoying this blog, so pleased it’s back, alive and kicking(ass).
I love the reaction these posts have with it’s readers, the comments are as good as the posts in terms of the responses they generate.
I personally am a relative newcomer to the industry, became aware of domaining maybe ten years ago, been studying the market for the last five years and been active for the last two.
My take on this post is: from most of my studying I always presumed that the secondary domains (net, org etc) were bought as a protection for the people who owned the dot com.
My own take on all these new extensions is that the great majority of internet users do not have a clue what they are all about, and are not really interested.
I’d like to thank Rick and all those who take the trouble to comment for enhancing my domaining knowledge.
Andrew Hyde
True Rick, I think the other extensions are wishful thinking. I hoped to be able to get something for nothing too when I started out, but it doesn’t work that way. Only.com has paid with the exception of a few one word .orgs. All you have to do is look at the traffic the other extensions don’t bring, numbers don’t lie. But, the smoke screen of these new gtlds has help whittle down the available cash to my competitors while buying other names, so that’s good.
Green Jobs
.COM is king!
Always has been and always will be. :)
Raven
As the .Com owner, I like it when morons register my keywords in other extensions so I get their traffic. Long live the sucky new gtlds.
Jose
Only two keywords, awesome post.
Happy day.
Jose.
smartwebby
Fantastic read! Thanks Rick for your honest no-BS commentary as always! :)
As I wrote on NP to that newbie it’s our blind spot that doesn’t let us make the correct decisions while learning. I am sure flowers.mobi was worth it to you not only in tax deduction but in the first hand lesson it gave you!! I feel that one turning point in your life (that you call mistake) made you an even bigger legend by wanting to save others from the .CRAP :)
IMHO If newbies would just go through your best old posts and understand the logic behind domain name investing they would make better choices when investing their hard earned money. Maybe you should post a link to all your top educational posts here.
steve
Who were the biggest promoters and evangelists of the GTLDs?
These guys cost newbies millions of USD.