Morning Folks!!
Pretty simple. If you own a SINGLE keyword LEFT of the dot and there is a new matching gTLD to the right of the dot, your traffic will soar. YOU are the basket for all their misdirected traffic. You are the basket for any and all confusion. There is no downside for .com counterparts. But there is a significant upside. Possibly life changing.
Now if you don't own any of those keywords, your benefits will be much less.
There will be a .Property. That means Property.com is the big winner.
There will be .Free. That means Free.com is the big winner.
There will be .whatever and whatever.com will be the winner.
Will be the winner for doing nothing but being there.
And the new gTLD will be missing THE most important part of their marketing puzzle.
There is no question about this. It has already been proven. It is fact. Now those that won't accept that fact will have a costly road in front of them. Matter of fact, there are so many facts after nearly 20 years and some ignore all of them and are destined to repeat failures of the past that should NOT be repeated as failures of the future, But by ignoring facts, their destiny awaits!
.Mobi has 1.2MM registrations. WHO CARES??
As a domain investment it was a FLOP! Period!!
We are "Domain Investors". If you want to play the registrar or registry game, go buy Tucows stock or one of the stocks of the others. Buying domains is not the key.
.Mobile......Really?? They will NEVER see 1.2MM registrations. Many won't even see the .2 regardless of their grand plans. And without domainers, MANY will die on the vine. .meaningless is coming.
So with 700 gtld's the first thing to do is to eliminate the ones with no chance of survivability. Then from the ones left, eliminate the bottom half of that list. You should not have no more than 35 gTLD's to even consider and that means 665 of them will ROT away. Won't even reach the levels of .Aero. And have no investment value whatsoever.
The proof lies in the aftermarket of .mobi, .xxx, .co, .biz, .aero, .travel and the list goes on. Who gives a rats ass about how many registrations they have when as an investment it lacks the elements needed to GROW your money and grow the value of the domain.
My advice as always, buy GREAT .coms and never worry that you have something with no value. I would rather overpay for a great .com then get a bargain for something with little or no value.
Rick Schwartz
Observer
So, the scope has become narrowed to a SINGLE keyword .com. But, two-word domain holders, do not be disappointed. There are much better two-word (even three-word) .coms than one-word .coms.
UFO
As pointed out previously the more ‘brandable’ a TLD is (Say .me as an example) then the more constrained it is to relevant business applicability. And because its constrained there are only so many useful domains that can be issued. That inhibits consumer awareness and critical mass. .com is an generic anchor, any keyword to the left works and MOST importantly it is the most relevant to Medium/Large scale commerce.
If .xxx and .us haven’t worked as domainer investments then imho nothing else will because they are prime, relevant and TLDs. There is a massive synergy to be gained by having the .com after your keyword even for .xxx type sites.
I used to say I don’t invest in 3 things, Tulip Bulbs, Snake Oil and Bit Coins. Now I’ll have to add new domain extensions.
M.G.
Rick, I know you are keyword .com person, preferring SHORT keyword names, but I would like to know your personal opinion about two-letter .com names. Most of them are hold by Fortune 500 companies, they are very rare and as two-letter names will be blocked in new gTLD, they will be rare even more. If you owned some, how much would you value it? Are such names good investment to buy and hold it? Thanks…
Rick Schwartz
$2mm-$8mm
Observer
Let me add a few more words to my earlier writing. If sombody owns an exampleonline.com and that example part is a very popular commercial keyword, he/she also wins even though it is a TWO-WORD domain IF .online is successful. Even without the help of .online, IMO, this type of two-word domain will be a success.
NEIL
Good morning,
Retail has moved online, like its highestcamp.com…
The Net will be flooded with more extensions and confusion…the customers will need months to remember bestbuy.onlineopportunitysaleandgadgets, book.nycaustraliapapuanewguineea, making unsafer a sinking global economy.
The new-non-sense extensions should be postponed in 2000-late, or 2050.never.
What BillGates.greedy and Zuckerberg.EverythingForMe say about that?
Just one man’s rhetoric questions…
thankful
Awesomd post rick. I totally agree and think the .whatevers will all die painful and costly deaths.
MaxD
Unfortunately 99% of domainers are incompetent and a little bit lazy, so they will continue to sell Rolex and crappy chinese watches on the same domain platforms, without understand that lack of differentiation will lead EVERYONE to death while differentiation could lead everyone to more more success.
UFO
‘MaxD Unfortunately 99% of domainers are incompetent and a little bit lazy, so they will continue to sell Rolex and crappy chinese watches on the same domain platforms, without understand that lack of differentiation will lead EVERYONE to death while differentiation could lead everyone to more more success.’
There’s only so much demand for crappy chinese watches and how would any new domain TLD lead to increased consumer demand for them? So yes, every will still continue to promote and sell on their .com’s and the new TLDs will crash and burn.
steve
I am going for .RickSucks
Right now there are 10 of us bidding for it.
ahahahah
patrick
Exactly i have two word multi billion dollar annual sales.com the actual word)s are a new version of this product and will be considered one word.
adriankinderis
If I’d spent millions in my port folio I’d have the same view. I’d do the same thing. Verisign is playing the same game. When the domainer industry is ready to lift their heads and innovate there will be new opportunities. The domainer industry has done nothing new in 5 years. Same old strategy just churning names between each other. You’ll soon realise that domain names themselves are under threat and if we don’t innovate, we die. Protect your investments with all the negative PR you can. Maybe, just maybe… they are losing real value every day. Goign to be interesting times.