.COM will lose ground to xxxx.travel xxxx.news xxxx.ibm xxxx.mcdonalds?

It will hurt .com values... but not by much.

It will hurt the value all existing extensions to some extent. All it takes is one single end-user to go out and register mybusiness.nyc rather than buy mybusiness.com (as it's probably already taken) or register a compromised domain such as mybusinessnyc.com.

At the very least that $10 going to a different registry.

Multiply that by 100,000 or 1,000,000 end users and you will probably notice an affect.

Remember, just because you think .whatever is a stupid idea doesn't mean that everybody else will.

Of course down the track, the whole idea may have gone to the dogs with bankrupt registries all over the place and a highly confused internet public. In which case, things will probably revert back to the norm.

The other point is that any confusion about extensions may drive the general public to rely more heavily on search rather than guessing extensions. This could also devalue domains in general....

Firstly, thanks to all those that posted contsructive and informative feedback, loved reading it!

Secondly, Im quite amused at those that think this thread is pointless. All it appears voted and contributed feedback, if this thread was pointless explain to me why in less then a day it received 27 posts.

Albert Einstein once said 'The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinkng then when we created them' & 'Imagination is more important then knowledge'

Where is your level of thinking at...............?

Whether we like it or not these extensions are here to stay. I do agree .COM will be king over the next decade, although I predict certain extensions like .ibm .travel .jobs will take off and be successful. There will be another facebook or Google in our lifetime and these young entrepreneurs are going to lean towards not .com (as they are either already registered or to costly) therefore you will find they develop whatever new extension they decide on regsitering!

Thanks again to everyones feedback! Agree or disagree I love reading your posts.

Cheers Mat

...just curious, is there going to be a limit to how many letters to the right of the dot or will it be .asmanyasyouwant ?






.

.Travel has one of the highest development ratios in the entire gtld space.

Seabass said:

If you go to 20 .travel sites and only two are developed, will you keep searching .travel for the prodserv you need?

The same with .mobi, .pro, .whatever.......it is a literal wasteland of undeveloped, half-hearted developed, or parked sites. Nothing can be gained by visiting those extensions. Nobody likes to hang out in a ghost town, and if surfers don't get what they want fast you can forget seeing them again. Hence the short domain's popularity....you get to your info. faster and easier with less keystrokes. The surfer has no patience and that is what is needed to find the info. you want in any of those vanity extensions. They will never gain critical mass to make a difference in the public eye, therefore no convenience factor to visiting that extension.

Who here can honestly say they go to a site in a .biz on a regular basis.....or even one time in the last six months! I'm just talking about one single site on the Internet. I'd bet dollars to donuts nobody here visits ANY .biz sites. Same is true with most of the other extensions.

There is a rule to investing in assets......whether it is coins, baseball cards, real estate, anything. If you buy the very best of the best, your investment will double, triple, or more. If you buy an inferior, sub-par asset your asset may go up in value, but usually only 10% or 30% or whatever but not 900%. Take a 1887 Morgan Dollar silver U.S. coin and look at the historical appreciation of the MS-55 coins......it won't touch MS-65 or MS-70's appreciation rate. Same is true with .com against the other extentions. If you want to make big money you really need to stick with .com and buy the very best .coms your money can buy. If you don't have the money to buy the best, than don't do it, unless you are happy with 20% returns, which is low for domain names.
.

Click to expand...

Will there be options for any ending?

For example, could you have 'I.want' or 'I.am' or something like 'Sport.scores'? I could see some potential for hacks of this nature, but that's about all that I could see taking off. Who would want to go to BigMac.McDonalds?

I am amused your first example was .Travel, since it already exists and no one cares about it. I think that is basically a preview of the fate of most other new extensions.

Brad

mathewka010 said:

Firstly, thanks to all those that posted contsructive and informative feedback, loved reading it!

Secondly, Im quite amused at those that think this thread is pointless. All it appears voted and contributed feedback, if this thread was pointless explain to me why in less then a day it received 27 posts.

Albert Einstein once said 'The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinkng then when we created them' & 'Imagination is more important then knowledge'

Where is your level of thinking at...............?

Whether we like it or not these extensions are here to stay. I do agree .COM will be king over the next decade, although I predict certain extensions like .ibm .travel .jobs will take off and be successful. There will be another facebook or Google in our lifetime and these young entrepreneurs are going to lean towards not .com (as they are either already registered or to costly) therefore you will find they develop whatever new extension they decide on regsitering!

Thanks again to everyones feedback! Agree or disagree I love reading your posts.

Cheers Mat

Click to expand...

gazzip said:

...just curious, is there going to be a limit to how many letters to the right of the dot or will it be .asmanyasyouwant ?
.

Click to expand...

I don't think they are limiting the max length. Min length is currently slated as three characters although there are some concerns that this could be quite hard on IDN extensions. Forcing at least 3 Mandarin characters for example is a bit rough.

sidekick_33 said:

Will there be options for any ending?

For example, could you have 'I.want' or 'I.am' or something like 'Sport.scores'? I could see some potential for hacks of this nature, but that's about all that I could see taking off. Who would want to go to BigMac.McDonalds?

Click to expand...

You could apply for anything. Remember the idea is that as a registry you team up with registrars (you can't sell directly) to sell domains to end-users (and domainers I guess)

mathewka010 said:

Firstly, thanks to all those that posted contsructive and informative feedback, loved reading it!

Secondly, Im quite amused at those that think this thread is pointless. All it appears voted and contributed feedback, if this thread was pointless explain to me why in less then a day it received 27 posts.

Click to expand...

Yeah I was a bit surprised at that! I think some people don't understand what is going to happen or are feaful so feel better just dismissing it.

I can see some value in it. It helps to categorise domains & therefore websites.

In an ideal world you would know straight away that

mycompany.sydney is based in Sydney
mycompany.kids caters for children
mycompany.shop is somewhere where you can buy online
mycompany.xxx is adult content (easy for parenst filters to block for eg)

However will the take up be enough to keep the registries in business (costs US$200Kpa to get someone to run it for you), how much confusion will it cause the general public and will it just be a mess of cybersquatting & lawsuits?

Sam said:

.Travel has one of the highest development ratios in the entire gtld space.

Click to expand...

Yes, of the 4 names registered 2 have been developed. :wave:

---------- Post added at 09:25 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:24 PM ----------

netfleet said:

It will hurt .com values... but not by much.

It will hurt the value all existing extensions to some extent. All it takes is one single end-user to go out and register mybusiness.nyc rather than buy mybusiness.com (as it's probably already taken) or register a compromised domain such as mybusinessnyc.com.

At the very least that $10 going to a different registry.

Multiply that by 100,000 or 1,000,000 end users and you will probably notice an affect.

Remember, just because you think .whatever is a stupid idea doesn't mean that everybody else will.

Of course down the track, the whole idea may have gone to the dogs with bankrupt registries all over the place and a highly confused internet public. In which case, things will probably revert back to the norm.

The other point is that any confusion about extensions may drive the general public to rely more heavily on search rather than guessing extensions. This could also devalue domains in general....

Click to expand...

I think that sums it up well, more choice is never likely to be good for those who already have the market. I agree the effect is likely to be low, but it isn't positive for .com. I suspect the worst effect will be on alt tlds, it is very direct competition for them. I voted for the first option.

---------- Post added at 09:32 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:25 PM ----------

mjbenterprises said:

This won't make .com weaker, it'll only make it stronger..

Click to expand...

How is that likely?

netfleet said:

In an ideal world you would know straight away that

mycompany.sydney is based in Sydney
mycompany.kids caters for children
mycompany.shop is somewhere where you can buy online
mycompany.xxx is adult content (easy for parenst filters to block for eg)

Click to expand...

That's how a person with highly developed logic thinks. In the real world things do not work that way. Overwhelming majority of real web surfers would not be able to go straight to opera.sydney if you wrote it down on a piece of paper in front of them and told them: Look at opera dot sydney website address on the paper in front of you. Now open the web browser and go to opera dot sydney website address.

i explained to a friend about .tv he then typed in the...... name.tv.com and asked why it wasn't working ????

There will be much confusion, that may help established extensions

I could see bands wanting their .music ....... acdc.music ?

One other thing to consider is the vast majority of niche terms will not fit an extension.

Let's say you sell horses for a business. What extension is going to fit that?

Let's say there was an extension .GOLD

Buy.Gold / Sell.Gold...then what? I mean most of these extensions are going to have a very limited number or keywords that fit.

I could see some very top tier GEO domains working like Jobs.Chicago, RealEstate.Boston, or similar. However more than likely it will be domainers who secure those types of domains and not end users anyway since they will have no clue about the process.

Brad

evirtual1 said:

i explained to a friend about .tv he then typed in the...... name.tv.com and asked why it wasn't working ????

There will be much confusion, that may help established extensions

I could see bands wanting their .music ....... acdc.music ?

Click to expand...

mathewka010 said:

ICANN's new proposal for TOP LEVEL DOMAINS- xxxx.weather xxxx.ibm xxxx.jobs xxxx.australia are we now going to see a new leader in the race for technology success!

Click to expand...

mjbenterprises said:

This won't make .com weaker, it'll only make it stronger..

Click to expand...

.com is THE INTERNET in most people's (end users) minds.
Been around since the advent of internet. (when Al Gore invented it )
The proliferation of gTLDs just makes things more confusing to many end users.
People like the familiar.
ccTLDS of course have their place, perhaps impacting .com's.
All in all, I'd think .com will get stronger.

xxxx.weather, xxxx.ibm, xxxx.jobs, xxxx.australia
now if ICANN would introduce .xxx ... that's another story
that would heavily impact com

weather.xxx, ibm.xxx, jobs.xxx:O, australia.xxx ...

Seabass said:

There is a rule to investing in assets......whether it is coins, baseball cards, real estate, anything. If you buy the very best of the best, your investment will double, triple, or more. If you buy an inferior, sub-par asset your asset may go up in value, but usually only 10% or 30% or whatever but not 900%. Take a 1887 Morgan Dollar silver U.S. coin and look at the historical appreciation of the MS-55 coins......it won't touch MS-65 or MS-70's appreciation rate. Same is true with .com against the other extentions. If you want to make big money you really need to stick with .com and buy the very best .coms your money can buy. If you don't have the money to buy the best, than don't do it, unless you are happy with 20% returns, which is low for domain names..

Click to expand...

That is a one way of looking at things. I have had 500%-1,000% returns on aftermarket purchased .coms but I have also turned down multiple offers that would have given me similar or higher returns on hand regged and aftermarket purchased .pros. I'll give you two examples, I regged Piano.pro on 21 October 2007 for $99, on 15 December 2007 I got a $1,500 offer which I turned down. That would have been a 1,615% return in 55 days. I bought Offshore.pro for $600 in December 2007 and turned down a $4,500 offer for it from a Czech company in November 2008.

If you hand regged top .coms in the mid to late 1990s then you have reached the pinnacle of domaining and there is no need to consider alternative extensions. If like alot of people, you didn't get into domaining until much later the .com aftermarket route isn't necessarily the biggest money spinner. Selling casino.anything for $1,000 may be easier than selling the 81 millionth domainer choice in .com for $1,000.

.com domainers try to shepherd new domainers to the .com aftermarket because that's how they make their money and get exits on their investments. If a newbie pays $10 to register casino.anything, that's one less customer for a .com domainer. The problem with the .com aftermarket is that it's massively overpriced. I'm always looking to buy .coms but I rarely see anything I consider good value, I buy perhaps 1 or 2 .coms per year.

There is no right or wrong answer about whether people should buy .coms on the aftermarket or register alternative extensions. It's like choosing between investing in blue chip stocks and startups. Startups offer bigger returns but are riskier. Easy money blinds people to risk. Top .com domainers don't like to acknowledge how precarious their wealth is. If Google decided to change its algorithm tomorrow so only relevant content and backlinks affected page rank and stripped out the favourable impact of years of continuous domain registration, .com values would be hit badly. PPC is already disappearing, there is bound to be less type in traffic in future as internet users get more savvy and search engines deliver more relevant results by analysing content.

A whole raft of new gTLD's is the biggest threat to the domain industry ever but again, according to some people on this thread, it isn't worth talking discussing. It will be fascinating to see whether big companies consider their own brands to be stronger than .com and use .microsoft and .ibm. Also, it will be interesting to see how search engines adjust their algorithms. If somebody types in "Microsoft" it surely makes sense to rank any domain ending .microsoft which is owned and run by microsoft first. OK, Microsoft rank top anyway for Microsoft but what if there was a software compant called Bingo or Poker, then things could get interesting.

I see new gTLDs as marking the beginning of the end for "it could mean" ccTLDs like .ws, .cc, and .im. Where only the keyword supports domain value, unlimited keyword availability and better keyword extension fit is going to be very damaging. .com will be less affected than other extensions because of its preeminence but the new wave of gTLD's will inevitably make it more acceptable to use alternative extensions and that will hit valuations.

If you invest in alternative extensions, you should stick to branding suffix extensions like .tv, .me and .pro where the keyword and extension fit, or established and partially developed alternative extensions like .info.

I disagree with the generalisations made about .pro in this thread, it actually produces some stunning domains like Golf.pro, Football.pro, and Poker.pro. Go to the US trademark database uspto.gov, click trademarks, select number 3) search TM database, click Structured Form Search, add Pro in as a search term, then select Non Punctuated Word Mark in the field, finally submit query. There are 15,341 trademarks incorporating the word Pro, that's more than the majority of alternative extensions added together. .pro has been very lightly regged because until September 2008 virtually nobody qualified to register them at the second level and it cost $99 to register by proxy, since then only professionally qualified people have been allowed to register. The upshot is that only 10% of registrars by volume offer them. You can hardly bundle it in with other alternative extensions that are freely available to register and offered by every registrar. It's not a like for like comparison.

This was quite a big scare a while ago, but .com is still king. This shouldn't have too much effect overall, if anything, it could just confuse people and make .com even better

The statis quo will remain - new extensions will be no different than existing ones including .com - the people that know what they're doing will get the valuable domains and the people that don't will get the crap that's not worth anything. The only difference will be that most of the domains in these new extensions will be crap that's not worth anything.

Seriously, it's not like people aren't already registering awful domains, even in .com. Look at what expires on a daily basis.

akcampbell said:

I have had 500%-1,000% returns on aftermarket purchased .coms but I have also turned down multiple offers that would have given me similar or higher returns on hand regged and aftermarket purchased .pros. I'll give you two examples, I regged Piano.pro on 21 October 2007 for $99, on 15 December 2007 I got a $1,500 offer which I turned down. That would have been a 1,615% return in 55 days. I bought Offshore.pro for $600 in December 2007 and turned down a $4,500 offer for it from a Czech company in November 2008.

Click to expand...

Let us know when you have some examples of people actually making a profit rather than just missing opportunities.

NameTrader.com said:

The statis quo will remain - new extensions will be no different than existing ones including .com - the people that know what they're doing will get the valuable domains and the people that don't will get the crap that's not worth anything. The only difference will be that most of the domains in these new extensions will be crap that's not worth anything.

Seriously, it's not like people aren't already registering awful domains, even in .com. Look at what expires on a daily basis.

Click to expand...

I agree.

Separated by a DOT

netfleet said:

The other point is that any confusion about extensions may drive the general public to rely more heavily on search rather than guessing extensions. This could also devalue domains in general....

Click to expand...

Sorry to say but I think there is truth in that statement. Wheras .com "was" a brand shared by many companies the only thing these Web 3.0 domains will have in common is just a dot. In the .Com age, the suffix was what led people to believe that a string of words was an Internet destination. It will soon just be auto.parts, find.singles, trucks.ford, info.ebay. (No wait, that last one was ebay.info. My brain is now spinning connecting the "dots".)

Anybody want to buy an LLLL .travel with 168 million exact results? PM me.

snoop said:

Let us know when you have some examples of people actually making a profit rather than just missing opportunities.

Click to expand...

Based on that logic, everybody who has ever turned down an $X,XXX+ offer in an extension you don't approve of has missed an opportunity.

I'll give you an example of an NP member who has accepted that sort of offer for a .pro. Zuriko regged Freelance.pro in Jun 07 and sold it for $5,440 16 months later in Oct 08. That was a 5,000% return. See dnsaleprice.com, the domain is now developed.

akcampbell said:

.com domainers try to shepherd new domainers to the .com aftermarket because that's how they make their money and get exits on their investments. If a newbie pays $10 to register casino.anything, that's one less customer for a .com domainer. The problem with the .com aftermarket is that it's massively overpriced. I'm always looking to buy .coms but I rarely see anything I consider good value, I buy perhaps 1 or 2 .coms per year.

Click to expand...

Any newbies starting out in domaining are bound to fail if they invest in .com - it's too late to ride that wave IMO.

It's become dependent on new blood (like what fueled the LLLL rush) and now that people are starting to realise that end-users are looking at alternate extensions (inc ccTLDs) it's all downhill from here...

akcampbell said:

Based on that logic, everybody who has ever turned down an $X,XXX+ offer in an extension you don't approve of has missed an opportunity.

Click to expand...

Those two examples of yours do sound like obvious missed opportunities rather than advertisments for .pro. When someone offers you 16 times what you paid for a name 2 months before you take that offer. It doesn't mean the extension has suddenly shot up in value, it likely means they are offering too much. In short it is time to stop telling us about the sales you "coulda", "woulda" had and tell us about the sales you have actually had, last I heard that was $0.

---------- Post added at 03:02 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:57 PM ----------

akcampbell said:

I'll give you an example of an NP member who has accepted that sort of offer for a .pro. Zuriko regged Freelance.pro in Jun 07 and sold it for $5,440 16 months later in Oct 08. That was a 5,000% return. See dnsaleprice.com, the domain is now developed.

Click to expand...

We now have an example of a profitable sale. So is this an example of someone who has made a profit from .pro (revenue-expenses), how many others have had a similar result?

If IBM becomes computers.ibm, Ford becomes trucks.ford , Boeing becomes airplanes.boeing, McDonalds becomes bigmac.mcdonalds and NBC becomes shows.nbc- if suddenly, the corporate world embraces vanity TLD's (due to the control they'd have over their marketing) yeah, it could finally crack the publics visceral association with .com that itself was established by marketing dollars in the early days, given the benefit of a lot of time. It would require a big time paradigm shift, but one thing about paradigm shifts- very few see them coming and those who have an interest in the paradigm not shifting are virtually certain to rationalize the impending changes away, vaunting the superior skill of Polish cavalry over German mechanized forces, given the ruggedness of the terrain.

The concept of Unlimited gTLDs could just as easily it could fall flat on it's face, though. It's entirely possible that keyword.keyword is just too 'bizarre' for the .com conditioned public and they reject it. If not, though, Katie Bar The Door. The same power we all recognize as being inherent to keywords will suddenly be shifted to the right of the dot and premium .com names will devalue in direct proportion to the cost and availability of an eponymous TLD. We're in uncertain times.

One thing that's VERY important to note here is that what we're seeing with "build-your-own" TLD's is a universe away from what we saw in the past with stupid gTLD's like .biz, .asia, .pro and .info. It's a complete failure of logic to cite other lame ICANN fabricated gTLD's as being some sort of harbinger for the pending failure of completely custom TLD's. That's comparing a Yugo to a Ferrari and claiming them to be equal since they both have four wheels and an engine. Your own TLD is a very special form of self/business-actualization that is incomparable to simply buying a keyword on a generic 'special purpose' gTLD platform.

While it's 100% dead-certain that acquiring a TLD will only get cheaper over time, it's equally certain that the associated costs won't ever get all the way down to the domain name level, where the only barrier to entry is a few bucks and a debit card. You won't see guys in the 3rd World snapping up TLD's from internet cafes, before going home to their mud and twig huts.

Still, unlimited gTLD's is very very very interesting; people in the domain community are generally sticking their fingers in their ears and shouting "LALALALALA" rather than making a cool analysis of what might happen. Of course, based on what drop lists look like, I'm convinced the "domain community" is filled with idiots to begin with, which is a beautiful thing. Wherever idiots with money are found, there is profit to be had :D

Dongsman said:

The concept of Unlimited gTLDs could just as easily it could fall flat on it's face, though. It's entirely possible that keyword.keyword is just too 'bizarre' for the .com conditioned public and they reject it. If not, though, Katie Bar The Door. The same power we all recognize as being inherent to keywords will suddenly be shifted to the right of the dot and premium .com names will devalue in direct proportion to the cost and availability of an eponymous TLD. We're in uncertain times.

Click to expand...

Let's face it, that is the most likely outcome rather than it being a 50:50 bet.

Dongsman said:

One thing that's VERY important to note here is that what we're seeing with "build-your-own" TLD's is a universe away from what we saw in the past with stupid gTLD's like .biz, .asia, .pro and .info. It's a complete failure of logic to cite other lame ICANN fabricated gTLD's as being some sort of harbinger for the pending failure of completely custom TLD's. That's comparing a Yugo to a Ferrari and claiming them to be equal since they both have four wheels and an engine. Your own TLD is a very special form of self/business-actualization that is incomparable to simply buying a keyword on a generic 'special purpose' gTLD platform.

While it's 100% dead-certain that acquiring a TLD will only get cheaper over time, it's equally certain that the associated costs won't ever get all the way down to the domain name level, where the only barrier to entry is a few bucks and a debit card. You won't see guys in the 3rd World snapping up TLD's from internet cafes, before going home to their mud and twig huts.

Still, unlimited gTLD's is very very very interesting; people in the domain community are generally sticking their fingers in their ears and shouting "LALALALALA" rather than making a cool analysis of what might happen. Of course, based on what drop lists look like, I'm convinced the "domain community" is filled with idiots to begin with, which is a beautiful thing. Wherever idiots with money are found, there is profit to be had :D

Click to expand...

Let's face it, everytime it is totally different and better otherwise nobody would buy the "new relovutionary change".

Going back in time,

1999: .cc and .ws - All the rage amoung new speculators was .cc, .ws and .tv - they were going to be serious competition for .com.

2000: new.net - this was different because of all these new extensions, .shop, .travel etc. ISP's were adopting this alternate route it and it was bound to take off and give serious competition to Icann. Indeed Icann was probably going to have to add all these extensions to the dns eventually. They'd have no choice if they wanted to stay relevant.

2001: .info and .biz - supposedly it would be different this time, these were the real deal, not lame repackaged country code extensions or alternate DNS names.

2002: .us This is the first real challenge to .com. Cctlds are the main extension in many countries around the world. How could this not get popular?

2006: .mobi - This is totally different! the first extension specific to the mobile web, this was bound to fly. It was totally unlike prior dud extensions (.info, .biz) in that it had a genuine rapidly expanding market and was back by the biggest Internet co's, Google, Microsoft etc, how could that ever fail?

Today: all the new extensions - It is totally different this time, unlimited new tlds, the world could easily change, get your credit cards ready!

Whilst alot of new players get involved in these you also see some people constantly make the same mistakes. I remember alot of new.net people going mad for .biz and .info and alot of them liked .us and then .mobi aswell. Every time it was going to be different.

My prediction is these names will be another repreat of the past, totally different, yet some somehow totally the same with much the same types of people investing (those who missed out perviously). It is a new set of extensions designed for selling "the dream" to domainers, it will be marketed mainly to domainers and cared about mainly by domainers. It will have a negative effect on .com, but only due to small numbers of co's using them, just like .cc, .tv, .info and .mobi.

snoop said:

We now have an example of a profitable sale. So is this an example of someone who has made a profit from .pro (revenue-expenses), how many others have had a similar result?

Click to expand...

Zuriko also sold Tour.pro, Booking.pro, Claim.pro, and Claims.pro for $X,XXX+, again all registered in mid 07. Another NP member, MJS, sold Video.pro for $35,000, Stream.pro for $11,000, Streaming.pro for $18,000 and Movie.pro for $22,000. These were regged in early 05 and sold in Mar 07.

Why is it so difficult for you to accept that for somebody who didn't hand reg .coms in the mid to late 1990s, it may actually be easier to sell Casino.anything than the utter rubbish that is left in .com after 80m+ picks.