discuss Are gTLDs affecting .Com price and growth

[Isac]

I think there is a decline in demand and price of .com domains because of new gTLDs. What's your opinion ?

 

[dordomai]

No I think prices move up and down and it has little to do with the nGTLDs. in my opinion only very low quality .coms would be affected.

.com is still growing while new extensions are declining.

There are other factors that affect the market that matter much more than the 'new Gs'

 

[boker]

What's a unicorn company?

'A unicorn is a startup company valued at over $1 billion. The term was coined in 2013 by venture capitalist Aileen Lee, choosing the mythical animal to represent the statistical rarity of such successful ventures.'
This is the standard definition but I think that you can name a unicorn company any company with a value of over 100 millions and which has a bright future.

 

[bmugford]

I think there is a decline in demand and price of .com domains because of new gTLDs. What's your opinion ?

There is certainly not a re-seller decline. Have you been watching auctions on popular venues?
Almost every marginal .COM is going for mid $XXX+ now.

Brad

 

[ksusha64]

I think there is a decline in demand and price of .com domains because of new gTLDs. What's your opinion ?

I do not think people even know that new gtlds even exist. It can't possibly effect dot com prices. There are many domainers who went broke buying them. That's about it.

 

[bmugford]

Do you think these price increases will sustain and continue to increase?

I would say that end user demand seems to have remained about the same while re-seller prices have climbed drastically. Now pretty much any decent .COM is around mid $XXX re-seller.

The math made a lot more sense when you could get decent names for $50 - $100.

When you factor in the average turnover rate, you need higher margins on the domains that do sell to cover the ones that don't.

Brad

 

[Kate]

The value of the new gtld's will be seen in years, not 2-3-4 years, but 10-15.

.info, .biz, .pro are 15+ years old and they are not a great investment proposition.

 

[Kuffy]

I'm hoping that the reverse is true. I don't think that anyone with a decent .com will switch to another extension, but the new TLDs may be encouraging people to start their own website, and then experience may lead them to switch to a .com when they find one.

 

[bmugford]

Long story short - .com is fighting a battle on a thousand fronts. And while .com is king and some think its untouchable... Its reputation and perceived value is being attacked by literally thousands of new choices/extensions for end users which will only distort and destabalize .coms value even further - like waves slowly withering away a boulder. Worse part is that .com's only counter-attack is general perceived value from the past- which will inevtiably change like everything else in life. Especially when you find out that some "hot shot" .com domains dont have merely as much traffic as they are runoured to have. I mean its 2017 - lets be honest - who is honestly making money off parking domains??!!!

There was a time when Napolean Bonapart would use aluminum silverware over precious metals because its value was perceived as more at that time. Boy have times changed and will continue to change!!!

Eventually the walls will come crumbling down for most type of .com assets - aside from 1-3L .coms and short premium one words. Just my opinion

I doubt it.

The truth is so far the new gTLD program has been a disaster that is currently losing registrations and has far under-performed expectations.

Lots of new gTLD proponents act like the future is going to change usage patterns, while at the same time all the young people are exposed to .COM used my popular sites daily - Facebook.com, Twitter.com, Google.com, Instagram.com, YouTube.com, and basically every other popular site.

As long as domains have value there is going to be value in popular terms, products, services, etc. followed by .COM.

Brad

 

[GoKaizen]

I do not think people even know that new gtlds even exist. It can't possibly effect dot com prices. There are many domainers who went broke buying them. That's about it.

 

[boker]

No I think prices move up and down and it has little to do with the nGTLDs. in my opinion only very low quality .coms would be affected.

.com is still growing while new extensions are declining.

There are other factors that affect the market that matter much more than the 'new Gs'

I don't have time now, but in one of the next days I could make a selection of names sold 5-7-10 years ago and which are for sale now or they were sold lately again, the prices are down even by 90% in some cases, I would like to see, if there are, some premium .com that have sold a few years ago for a certain amount and which were resold again in the last year or so higher, I don't think you could find even 5 examples. The first affected are truly the lower end value of com's, but it's like a chain reaction: the buyers of low cost com's are going to ngtlds, because of this, the prices of average 1k-3k are down, because it's less competition, to much inventory and multiple choices and it's going like this all the way up. My vision is that .com will always be the king, but I think it will drop in value until it will reach around 30% of the top prices from some years ago, 50% of the 1k or so ngtld will not survive(something like mobi), 25% will be average(like info-biz now) and 25% will do good, some will replace a part of the mid value .com's. Probably you can still find some high end sales for certain names, but these sales will not be a norm, more some isolate examples. Also, we have the crypto currencies market, parking and online ads value going down, alternative investments. The true is that around 60% of unicorn companies are still choosing .com for now, but you should consider that a few years ago 90% of them were choosing com and also the unicorn companies represent less than 1% of the total number of companies. 99% of the 6k startups born every day will afford a low cost brandable .com or a catchy ngtld, so all the statistics about what extension are using the companies raising millions/billions are not so important for 90% of the rest of us.

 

[urlurl]

I feel the .com is the safe haven of domain extension. i do believe it will affect the other original extensions (.org, net, info, etc)

As an end user (believing my business will be a success) i would want to secure the .com before looking at loading up on other extensions... and if i did. it would only be used a shortner.

 

[GoKaizen]

No

They make good .com, .org, and ccTLDs a more attractive deal.

 

[bmugford]

.info, .biz, .pro are 15+ years old and they are not a great investment proposition.

But, this time it will be different...............

Brad

 

[Kate]

Long story short - .com is fighting a battle on a thousand fronts. And while .com is king and some think its untouchable... Its reputation and perceived value is being attacked by literally thousands of new choices/extensions for end users which will only distort and destabalize .coms value even further - like waves slowly withering away a boulder.

So far the instability is in the nTLDs.
The past four years since nTLDs were introduced have been disappointing. Is the trend like to improve ? Why and how ? I think it could worsen. NTLDs are unwanted children trying to justify their existence. Consumers weren't asking for hundreds of arbitrary strings.

Worse part is that .com's only counter-attack is general perceived value from the past- which will inevtiably change like everything else in life.

Domain extensions are not mere technical identifiers, but they are brands too.
.com is a brand
ccTLDs are brands too, and they are also virtual flags, that command allegiance.
Thus, they are not easily interchanged.
But one day .com will disappear for sure. The DNS will probably be obsolete before nTLDs become mainstream. But I think the DNS can last for a few more decades, like phone numbers which are old technology too.

.com has enormous accumulated mass with 130 million regs. Even if end users decided to ditch .com and shift to new extensions, they would take decades to catch up.
Still, for many years .com has been losing ground to ccTLDs in terms of market share. In mature markets outside the US, the local extension is considered more relevant than .com. So how are non-.com gTLDs supposed to thrive in that kind of environment ? There is very little room left. But again, they are so late to the game...

Oh by the way. If you are wondering if gTLDs are affecting .com growth we can have a guess:

Source: http://www.registrarstats.com

 

[BaileyUK]

I think it is fair to 'acknowledge' that a fair amount of what I would call 'New-Domainer' Investment money is going into the new domain extensions. Which in-turn is probably having an effect on the resellers market for the middling type domains in the establish extensions. But for anyone to believe that end business users are suddenly going to wake-up and think hey lets run with one of these new domain extensions and burn our marketing budget on a wing and a prayer, I don't think so.
Lets not forget the domain market of old, came about because most businesses Didn't have a web presence in 1999 to lets say 2005/6/7 etc.. But, domainers (of old, yes like me) had bought up all the territory. in the belief that any decent business is going to want its web presence. You can't reinvent that 'Surge/Requirement/Need again today. Today we are all solely dependent on New business start-ups. Market department whims and budgets etc today sell to end-users. The market can never return to it's heyday, no matter what your wishful thinking may be.
To say .com and all that was out there before the new tlds - i.e., All the established web presence of literally millions of businesses (with an on line presence today) are at anytime going to awaken to these NEW domains is like saying every business is going to reinvent itself. Sure there's turnover and new presence everyday but, that's just a fraction of the opportunities of old And the opportunities, today they're simply Not there anymore for most of us.
end user sales today need to be in .com or the Country code and have an appeal and believe me even those aren't easy. I do wish the new domain extension holders well but this is not an ongoing market growth anymore - so to flood it with this fodder is simply the controlling authorities up-high trying to milk the last out of the whole domain system.

 

[Kate]

 

[jmcc]

I've tried to find a statistic made by a australian company related to tld usage in europe, but I can't find it right now. They have asked random peoples in each country what site they will use/trust first if they want to shop/need info: example.fr(for France) or example.com/ngtlds
The result was between 61% to 87% will choose the cctld, the 61% being in UK, the average being around 80% in most countries. So, when you have 80% of the customers choosing a cctld, why would you want to use a com to loose tones of traffic? Also, 2,6% were saying that they will trust a ngtld, the example being a .insurance domain, for auto insurance.

I don't trust opinion poll surveys because they are generally inaccurate and have small sample sizes. In Europe, certainly in Western Europe, the ccTLD dominates its local market. The .COM has gone legacy in most of these countries and usage and development in the ccTLDs numerically outstrips .COM usage and development. The reason for this is simple: most business is local. That means that people are more likely to use a local ccTLD website because it has a higher level of trust and identifies the business as being local. The .COM has no such loyalty.

Regarding .com being considered more as US tld than international I don't know about any statistic, but I can tell you what business owners and customers with whom I interact are saying and I'm dealing with peoples from 7-8 european countries, so it's not something true for just an area.

The .COM is the de facto US ccTLD and most .COM registrations are on US hosters and registrars.

It's simple, go on the street and ask peoples with what they associate example.com and example.it, or more accurate something like amazon.com and amazon.it and you will notice the response.

When it comes to large brands, the TLD does not matter. People identify the brand not the TLD.

In reality it's exactly the same, they use .com for US market and cctld for the rest of them, so probably it's their fault as well, if you ask somebody in Europe what tld they will use if they want to buy from a company from US, over 90% will say .com, I don't think you will find to many(if any) who will say something about using .us

The .US ccTLD has been chronically undermarketed for years. It really should be at the 50 million registrations mark or higher. But that's a different subject.

Also, .com being controlled by US government and US laws doesn't help, it's a difference of views between EU an US, from data protection to laws, that the 90% of business owners will choose to be protected by Eu laws in contrast with US laws, so being protected by local governments it's another plus for using a cctld.

Most endusers really haven't a clue on data protection and privacy issues.

As far as I know in Australia is the same, the wast majority will use a com.au than a .com, excepting hotels and international companies.

In most countries with a strong ccTLD, there's a point where the number of registered ccTLD domain names exceeds the number of .COM domain names and after that point, the .COM plateaus. The high volume growth in that market generally switches to the ccTLD. The .COM domain names are still used for international commerce but the bulk of the .COM registrations in such a country are old registrations.

Regards...jmcc

 

[Kuffy]

Thanks for the explanation - it doesn't seem to have much to do with the reality of unicorns though.

To refer to you earlier post, I'm not sure that the new TLDs have anything to do with .com values, other than increasing interest. I suspect that economic changes, and the rise of facebook, youtube and other social sites has more of an influence.

 

[JB Lions]

I don't have time now, but in one of the next days I could make a selection of names sold 5-7-10 years ago and which are for sale now or they were sold lately again, the prices are down even by 90% in some cases, I would like to see, if there are, some premium .com that have sold a few years ago for a certain amount and which were resold again in the last year or so higher, I don't think you could find even 5 examples.

Might be the most ridiculous thing I've read today, but the day is young.

You can find examples of anything. The Namebio blog goes thru past sales. Some go up, some go down.

 

[passini]

I am based in Italy and I can tell you that after .it comes .com. If you make business also outside Italy like an ecommerce or a fashion brand, just to make some examples, you go with .com. Also Italian keywords in .com do sell in the aftermarket, last week I sold a two word .com for mid XXX, note that both .eu and .net are still available for registration, this happens often. There is no reseller market for .eu or .net so I can't imagine how you can try to sell a gTLD, nobody uses them here and this is also true for almost all other European countries.

 

[Kate]

I think that somewhere in 3-5 years, 50% of the aftermarket sales will be done by gtlds, 30% of the sales by .com, and 20% of sales done by cctlds and some individual old legacy gtlds(.net, .org).

I think this is very optimistic.
There has to be a healthy primary market for a secondary market to take shape.
Ntld are already tanking, while .com and ccTLDs continue to grow.
So I can't see how the share of nTLDs in domain sales is going to increase any time soon. Maybe I am missing something.

What I find truly shocking is the lack of confidence in companies that have applied for their own strings. For example, Apple, Microsoft, still doing nothing with their corpTLDs. Then you have Canon, Barclays, hailed as success stories, yet they still have plenty of links to their .com or subdomains on their home page. Totally botched.

I am wondering where the traction will come from. Small businesses using nTLDs are not going to have much of an impact. nTLDs will be seen as some kind of .biz 2.0, ok for small fry but not desirable for serious projects.

PS: remember what some NP members were saying when the first batch of nTLDs was released. "Give it 3-5 years and new extensions will be mainstream, they will be everywhere, it will be a landslide". Sometimes people overestimate the pace of change.

 

[CrazyTech]

Just not convinced gTLDs are taking over. Yes, they will dilute the market some just by nature, but take a look around at the adverts and note that you're just not seeing buy-in. And let's face it, the enduser market is what drives the value in even in a reseller market.

Case in my point is my own industry, banking. We defensively purchased our domain name in the new .bank extension, and we've been careful to watch our peers. One bank adopted .bank, but there have been very few other examples. Most are either redirecting or just holding on to the domain in case it becomes an accepted domain. The whole push behind the domain, first adopted by some industry groups, was to take the .bank extension and make it a secure vehicle only owned by banks. This sort of thought process makes as much sense as any for a gTLD, but it saw little to no adoption.

 

[Kuffy]

What's a unicorn company?

 

[boker]

Might be the most ridiculous thing I've read today, but the day is young.

You can find examples of anything. The Namebio blog goes thru past sales. Some go up, some go down.

I know that for you everything is ridiculous when it's something about com. Just make a minimal effort and check namebio sales from 2007-2017, they have a statistic made on a daily basis with all the sales and you will see the treand. Also, it's fairly easy to check how many sales are made through namejet, dropcatch and the others( 90% resellers sales) and how many sales are made through sedo, flippa and some other venues where there are mostly end users, and compare the same data from 1-2-5 years ago, you will notice that now most of the reported sales are from resellers and 3-4 times less reported sales by end users compared with was a few years back, I have 80% of my names in com as well, but you're like a blind horse, which can see just in front and don't want to notice the general trend.

 

[Kate]

I'm curious, is there data to suggest there is a decline in demand and price of .com domains, and that the decline can be attributed to new gTLDs ?