The volatility and irrationality in this market is not restricted to one or a few transactions.
Definitely not ... and there are likely plenty more big losses that you will find out there. But if you look at the market as a whole, for every one such example, you'll find 100 more of big profit sales.
What happens when opportunity cost -associated with legacy top-level domains (e.g., .com, .net, .info, etc.)- is ignored?
Buyer pays
$188,000 for Crystals.com.
Crystals.app is available for $220 per year.
It would take
854 years of .app registrations (@ current prices) to match the cost the buyer apparently paid for Crystals.com.
What happened to the price of Champagne when the world realised there were better and cheaper grapes to make sparkling wine all over the world? It's branding was/is so strong that it didn't lose any value at all.
That's the irony of the domain game. For the most part domains are about branding .. and in fact the .com "brand" is probably one of the strongest brands in the world.
You say blabla.com anywhere in the world and 90-99+% of people will know you are talking about a website. Repeat the same experiment with blabla.app .. you won't get anything close to that.
In fact, I have my first name in .org ... and even myself who has been a domainer 2-3 years and owned domains/websites for much longer have sometimes sent documents to myself incorrectly at the .com! lol
For the company that can afford Crystals.com, chances are that owning the front-of-mind best domain name is worth vastly more than what they paid for the .com.
Another example of how
status quo bias favors .com top-level domain. A prodigious percentage of people still believe
#dotcom to be the only viable
#TLD choice out of 1,200+ other options.
This false premise of .com supremacy creates an illusion of scarcity which in turn artificially drives up the price for .com domain names –on the secondary market– at the expense of all other TLDs.
You've actually made my point for me. The technicalities don't matter .. good brands and in turn domains are acquired to market a company's product or services. Marketing is all about illusions. In almost every industry consumers pay a premium for a multitude of reasons on established or illusionally better brands. Do you really think a Gucci T-Shirt is still worth $400 if you remove the logo?
Yes .. some day altTLD's will become more established and recognised by the general population .. and at such a time while .com will still be more valuable because of the trust factor, the delta in price between .com and everything else will close. By how much? Who knows .. in fact .. it might not even be about .com really dropping much, but more about the others increasing.
There are too many variables to really give absolute predictions, but today .com while technically not very different from other TLD's, still is an astronomically superior "brand" than any other altTLD.
There is another reason why other gTLD's haven't taken off .. and that's a consequence of globalisation. In that while 50 years ago you'd have a bunch of companies called Acme all over the world. Today it's really about standing out from the whole rest of the world ... so if there already is a strong ABCXYZ company presumably already on the .com .. then nobody is going to want to be known as ABCXYZ .. making all the other gTLD's effectively useless.
Obviously there are plenty of exceptions and subtleties. Most importantly there is some demand for secondary gTLD's .. but in the world of first-to-market .. that also includes being first on a brand.