poll Domain Buyer Requests

equity78 said:

Well no the pattern would not be the same, those three fine organizations have no expertise in domain name pricing and sales.

When you are saying value, you are talking about GoDaddy, Estibot and Nameworth. But here is the thing everyone has names like that, automated appraisals mean nothing. The only thing that matters is real offers and real sales.

I can go find you names not registered currently that the three appraisal engines will value high.

There is no universal advice, .com generates the most sales and has the most liquidity, can you sell other extensions? Sure.

Your email and your bank account tell you if you are doing well in this business. Everything else is just conversation.

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Thank you for your response. Conversation can also be seen as a learning experience and I listen more than people give me credit for. I do not live in a Dot.Com world and very few people that I know would even have the faintest idea of what domain investing is. I have to adapt to my environment and maybe just hand regging a domain name for 10 bucks is all I will ever do. Maybe, I just derive my pleasure from small wins rather than four figures sales.

Some of my domains have been targeted to specific end users with no hint of any UDRP or TM issues, so maybe the only thing to say is that only time will tell and in the meantime I will just keep learning.

I do appreciate all of the feedback that is given in good spirit but sometimes it feels like Lewis Hamilton telling a 3 year old in a pedal cart how to drive.

Have-a-good-day.today

The key with new gtlds is finding those where the renewals are not going to add up super fast. It would have been nice to have a uniform plan where every extension auctioned off the best stuff for the most they could get and then have a $15 renewal. But I see all the time people who thought they regged a great .car name some of the best combos, or a great 2L.ext and they paid sometimes $3,000 a year then dropped after three years, whether an investor or end user you can't be spending a fortune on renewal.

equity78 said:

The key with new gtlds is finding those where the renewals are not going to add up super fast. It would have been nice to have a uniform plan where every extension auctioned off the best stuff for the most they could get and then have a $15 renewal. But I see all the time people who thought they regged a great .car name some of the best combos, or a great 2L.ext and they paid sometimes $3,000 a year then dropped after three years, whether an investor or end user you can't be spending a fortune on renewal.

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Thanks for your insights. I guess it is the same with anything that has a monetary value. Everything tangible has a price. If I have it and you want to buy it, then we agree a price and the transaction is completed. The secret is to spend what you can afford and this applies to both the buyer and the seller.

Although I would say that I have been a Domain Investor for only six months and could most definitely be described as a Newbie, I have owned and run websites within the last 5 years and know too well about the associated costs.

I am starting slowly, as funds allow and I certainly won't be running before I can walk. Not this year anyway lol.

My modus operandi for the time being seems to be hand reg for an average of €13 with a renewal cost of €19. This is a manageable model for me. The obvious bonus for this scenario would be to make a sale to offset the start-up cost so far which is €2,000. I don't personally know of any other business that I could start with such low initial capital funding.

Have I made mistakes? Will I make mistakes in the future? Will I learn from these mistakes? Yes, yes and yes.

If it were that simple, then everyone would be doing it.

If I am to hit the accepted industry average of 1-2% sales per year the I won't be getting rich but I will go someway towards paying the dreaded renewal fees.

Reddstagg said:

I am in a Country that blindly insists on using the Country extension .ie and I can't see that changing anytime soon. In fact, they will probably all just skip Dot.Com completely and move straight to the new tlds.

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It wasn't always like that. There was a time when a .IE was priced at around 125 Euro. The prices have fallen over the last twenty years or so but it is still anything from 5 to 30 Euros depending on which registrar is used. The .IE dominates the Irish market and the gTLDs are struggling. Even the .IRISH hasn't made much of an impact on the market.

As of 01 November 2019, these are the gTLD counts on Irish hosters:
.COM: 135,399
.NET: 9,943
.ORG: 7,416
.BIZ: 1,145
.INFO: 1,963
.MOBI: 450
.ASIA: 78
New gTLDs: 5,754
.IRISH: 1,014
.CLUB: 198

The 01 November 2018 figures are:
.COM: 139,363
.NET: 10,722
.ORG: 7,805
.BIZ: 1,369
.INFO: 2,208
.MOBI: 530
.ASIA: 93
New gTLDs: 5,475
.IRISH: 1,153
.CLUB: 224

Don't think that there will be any shift to new gTLDs any time soon. The second largest ccTLD in the Irish market is .UK with 33,801.

The Irish market was .COM focused when the prices on .IE were high and .COM was around 12 Euro but that's changed. This gTLD to ccTLD shift, where the main growth in a country's domain name market, always happens as the market matures. It has also happened on most European markets.

The non-core legacy gTLDs (BIZ/INFO/MOBI/ASIA) are in decline. The core legacy gTLDs (COM/NET/ORG) are relatively stable but the main growth is in .IE rather than the gTLDs.

The .COM is where the money and the buyers are. Unless people know a ccTLD market well, they will generally end up losing money on it because outside of a few very high value premiums, the old "what's valuable in .COM should be valuable in a ccTLD" idea simply does not work. This is because people in a ccTLD dominated market consider the ccTLD to be their TLD and don't have to remember the extension. When you have to explain that the domain name that you are trying to sell is a .COM or anything else, it becomes a far more difficult sale. As for the new gTLDs in the Irish market, many of the registrations are brand protection registrations (the owners have their domain name in .IE or .COM and are protecting the brand) rather than domain names for development.

Sharp declines in various TLDs, that's not the problem. The problem is when they shift their market focus. This generally happens when a stalled or plateaued gTLD decides to target the Asian markets because registrations from the rest of the world have stalled. They target the Asian markets with heavily discounted offers for the first year. This boosts the number of domain names in the gTLD and it appears that they are doing well but these discounted domain names don't renew well. If a registry is lucky, the renewal rate will be approaching 5%. More often, the renewal rate is closer to zero. This changes the geography of the gTLD so what had been a mainly English language gTLD with potential splits into a market with a smaller English language market and equally strong or stronger Chinese and Japanese language markets. In simple terms, it means that that high value, single English language keyword domain name just dropped in value by as much as 40%. If it is in a new gTLD, then the value will be much lower than that of the equivalent in .COM or even a ccTLD.

The problem with domaining is that there is only a few ways to make money and many ways to lose it.

Regards...jmcc