Morning Folks!!
Is Social Media about to implode? Well, Yeah, yeah it is. Growth is GONE! GONE! It's over! The bleeding has begun and is in full progress. Will they bleed out? Probably not, but they may look like a deflated balloon.
To me this was the #1 Story of 2018. As you may recall, I left twitter on December 31, 2017. Most thought I would be back in a few weeks. Well 52 weeks later......And I did the same with Facebook. As I wrote recently, "Social Media is no longer Social, it's Dangerous".
Many thought I was exaggerating and over reacting. But look back a year later. Folks are leaving these platforms in droves! Facebook stock down $100/share in months. There is true danger there and people and parents are starting to recognize this as a very serious issue.
The winner is US. Great domains. Needed, wanted, desirable and important domains. We are all responsible for the portfolios we have. No one is to blame for a worthless one other than ourselves. I have tried to point this out for decades. Now we really do enter a new period of domains. A great one.
It will still take YEARS for the average Joe to figure out he has made a huge mistake in promoting his or her social media pages and not have them eventually (ASAP) funneling to their own domain name.
And remember, I am EXCLUSIVELY talking about BIG LEAGUE .COM domains. PERIOD!!! ALWAYS!! I may dabble in Minor League extensions, but I know that a lottery ticket likely has more value. All other extensions sell for a fraction of a .Com. A SMALL or TINY fraction. And demand is so much lower! Does anyone even think about that?? Demand??
I am bullish on GREAT .Com domains. I am NOT bullish on anything else in domains. Some extensions will benefit from a rising tide. It will benefit more in demand than in increasing prices.
And as far as I am concerned, GTLD's are NOW DEAD and eventually someone will bury this stinky carcass! Bury it right next to those IDN's and Emoji's. A waste of time, money and effort. Cause of Death: Too many to list!
HUGE deals are coming in 2019 and 2020. We are entering a sweet spot and you have the downfall of Social Media to thank! You have Retail Mall Sales to thank.
But it starts, NOW. It already started in the last few months. But you will see an increase in domain activity in 2019 like never before and for a REASON. Most of these deals will be under the radar. Especially the deals that are north of $10 Million. And I think that you are going to see a rash of sales between $5 and $10 Million.
I am going to restructure my pricing. I am going to call it Sraes. That is Sears spelled backwards. Sraes. No, I don't need the domain name. lol And not really going to call it this. Just want to demonstrate how ass backwards Sears and many others are. How they missed such a huge opportunity to buy EVERY relevant domain name for LESS THAN the cost of ONE FAILING SEAR'S STORE!!
Not one genius there could figure it out? Really?? Malpractice! Go dig up the founders and I bet THEY would have figured it out. How sad!
It is now time for me to price a domain equal to greater than the cost to build a Sears store in the real world including gondolas etc. The finished product. I won't even count the 300 employees each store has. Or the cost of insurance and security and trash removal and electric and it just keeps going. Did I mention the land itself. Or maybe just a 99 year lease?
So I have been researching the costs. It's mind boggling. I can't even figure it out yet. I need help. What is the cost in New York or Hong Kong? What is the cost in Iowa or Wyoming?
Happy New Year's!
Rick Schwartz
Alex Verdea
Rick,
I am suspecting that you are correct in regards to most social media platforms. Anyone remember MySpace before Facebook was popular? Where are they now?…dead!
Meanwhile people seem to think that spending 50k on ads on Facebook is better then buying a 2 word .com brand.
I say advertising on a platform that you have no control over, that changes their policies multiple times a year is a stupid investment in the long run. Yeah you might acquire clients and leads in the short term, and it might be profitable NOW but you have to keep feeding the “Beast” month after month to get results.
In contrast buying a .com for 50k would bring leads and clients forever, and the best part is You are in control, and you end up with an asset that will more then likely appreciate in value.
I feel the same way about single word, higher quality 7 figure names.
John
Plenty of multi-word domains are also worth 7 figures or more.
Paul Pot
Oh please John. Stop spewing your drivel about multi-word .com. Just because you don’t have any quality one worders. Give it up. Broken record, much?
John
LOL, nothing better to do than to keep trolling me?
Snoopy
Well nobody is buying in that case John,
https://www.dnjournal.com/ytd-sales-charts.htm
The charts are full of one word .com. Need to go down to 30th place before a 2 word name even appears.
Adam
Let’s see 10
Mike Sallese
RIck,
Happy New Year! 2019 will hopefully be a great year.
Total back of envelope: I believe I recall that to open an Aldi store is Ike $3MM or so and they are like 15K square feet and a Sears is roughly 10X the size of that so $30MM is a very rough and very simplified estimate.
Cheers,
Mike
Sigma
I always believed that (3) factors would create a 2nd golden age for premium 1-2 word dot Coms with commercial meaning:
1. recession
2. retail apocolypse
3. death of the 1000s of GTLD strings
With Rick adding the 4th (collpase of social media big 3); I’m feeling real bullish on 2019-2020 for domain acquisitions and sales.
Happy New Year Rick and fellow speculators!
BullS
“Social Media is no longer Social, it’s Dangerous” and it is a totally time waster and piece of “BullS”– a platform for spreading fake news.
ricksblog.com-Best blog of the year 2018,2019,2020…again and again and again
domain guy
mmm…Interesting a collapse or more specially a shrinking of power, reach and trust. So the market shifts and recognizes the intrinsic power of a meaningful domain, that can be used as a brand that the public can trust?
And yes while the base price may escalate, the shrewd domain king will end up at the conclusion that his equity stock has more power and leverage and will increase in each future domain transaction.
This is important, with repeat customers returning home to a domain they trust. A new financial metric will unveil itself. The total lifetime value of a customer.
What are the repeat customers on candy.com? Cannot be revealed however I would bet each customer returns a minimum of 10 times.
And sales over 10 million cannot be afforded by many. So public company’s will release the domain sale in their financial disclosures.
John
There is no question about “big league” .coms. That includes “big league” .coms that are longer than one word. If anyone denies that, they are a “dumb domainer” as Rick put it the other day, treating the industry as a zero-sum game needlessly and shooting both themselves and everyone else in the foot needlessly. If anyone doesn’t understand, for instance, that domains like OfficeSupplies.com (Staples.com sucks as a domain by comparison), CaliforniaRealEstate.com, NewYorkRealEstate.com, OnlinePoker.com, HomeLoans.com, InsuranceQuotes.com, etc. are intrinsically “big league” domains then they are as clueless and “dumb” as it gets. If they do understand but say otherwise then they are simply liars.
That said about great .coms, I also suspect the time could be close for the American public to finally discover that .us even exists. Maybe, maybe not, but I don’t think the status quo since 2002 about that can continue indefinitely or for that much longer. And for those who are still “dumb” or liars (as in misrepresenting what I’m saying), that means BOTH (as in, not either/or) .com is just as big or bigger as Rick says (and I would certainly say too), AND people will finally take notice of .us. In fact, Ricks whole thesis means that domain names themselves would tend to be “rediscovered,” as he essentially acknowledges, but I believe the potential for the best .us is better than he would probably like to believe even though it is no zero-sum threat to one’s investment and self-interest in .com. And if that doesn’t get “Paul Pot” and “Snoopy” to troll me again I don’t know what will. ;)
Steve
The demise of The GTLDs is complete. Some quacks will claim they still have a heartbeat. Let some kind soul unplug the ventilators so they can expire without more poor newbie domainers throwing away hard earned money after the cries of the hucksters, charlatans and Music Men urge them to invest in the cool extensions which will supplant .com
How many former stars of the domain world have fallen and shattered on the shores of reality?
Steve
GTLDs dying; lack of trust with social media (FB no longer cool and mass exodus by millennials and no appeal for Gen Z; downloading of only must have apps; English remains the lingua franca of the Internet all signal a resurgence of good to great domains. But the economy must hold.
Leonard Britt
I recall that the construction cost for the Hollywood Beach, Florida Margaritaville project was stated to be $140 million.
Bobby
Hi Rick.
Thanks for repricing Higher.
The BIGGER sales will help all of the domainers out here, especially those with quality.
Domain names need to get into the public consciousness once and for all, the problem is the masses come around very slowly. The downfall of Social media will help make that more possible. An the monopolies of Google and FB need to end.
Best,
Bobby
Snoopy
“Folks are leaving these platforms in droves!”
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Is there some data for this or is it opinion? People have been saying this type of stuff for along time by the data usually shows otherwise.
Snoopy
Best data I can find,
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/aug/10/peak-social-media-facebook-twitter-and-snapchat-fail-to-make-new-friends
Shows Facebook user numbers in decline in Europe but still growing overall. Twitter doing a lot worse.