Is new GTLD's affecting dot COM sales?

I have seen a decline in sales the last couple years and the domains which sell are for low $XXX prices rarely much higher. High $XXX and low $XXXX sales were far more common five to six years ago than over the last year. An article by TheDomains.com mentions Rightside selling $5 million in Premium domains with 675 sales where renewals were $1000 or more. There have been some 15-16 million new TLD registrations mostly domainers but still a lot of capital has flowed into new TLDs which without them would otherwise have flowed into aftermarket purchases of .COM or other already existing TLDs.

The new TLD registries are competing against domainers who hold domains in other extensions.

So basically domainers are funding their own demise by giving the registry money to market the new extensions.

I would say historically I had a lot of low $XXX sales for domains that today I might not even renew. A fair portion of domain sales even high $XXX and occasionally low $XXXX were to investors. Now investors are only paying low $XXX and less frequently as they have more TLD options. Newbies have loaded up on new TLDs whereas in the past they might have bought some lower-priced aftermarket domains. So the new TLDs have siphoned off a lot of domainer to domainer sales and some end user sales as well. Think about what 16 million new TLDs some premium translates into just in renewals - probably more than $200 million yearly that could have gone into .COM, .Net, .etc purchases. SEDO used to report median .COM sales of about $600 on its platform. So now that we are approaching two and a half years after new TLDs were launched, we know that many millions went into premium-priced new TLDs, so there have been hundreds of millions of dollars of resources expended on new TLDs which otherwise would have gone into legacy extensions.

Note that even before new TLDs were launched, average portfolio turnover was very low 1-2%.

Not a precise answer to the original question, but more an addendum to @garptrader's comments.

I'm trying to drop most of my gTLD's and ccTLD's besides .COM to pay for renewals of some/most of my nGTLD's. I'm a global domainer. I don't have the knowledge in the ccTLD markets to make an impact. Actually I have almost no ccTLD's besides .US, CC, .TV, .WS. And since I almost have had no sales in anything other than .COM, I'm dropping most of my non .COM gTLD's also. Leaving me with just .COM and nGTLD's and maybe a handful (maybe 90% less than currently) of .US, CC, .TV, .WS ccTLDs

Cheap new TLDs do have an effect. Website developers want a name quick. When they see mysite.com taken, but mysite.the open, they'll choose the latter instead of searching the aftermarket.

At some point you reach saturation. Yes, there are hundreds of new TLDs but many new TLDs only work with a limited number of keywords and most of those are classified as premium. If not, they have been grabbed by investors. So when all the halfway decent choices are taken or reserved or premium, perhaps buyers move back to .COM

when 100 million are on the dole in the USA alone think about why your sales are down.

its not the gtld that's the cause its the world economy is spiralling bigtime!

artstar said:

when 100 million are on the dole in the USA alone think about why your sales are down.

its not the gtld that's the cause its the world economy is spiralling bigtime!

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Really? That's interesting