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 ?

 

[LovingLife]

I don't know much domaining.. But because of gTLDs, the value of .COM is gone up.

I have heard that several times but I don't understand the logic behind that thinking. Is there any evidence to back that up?

There was an increase in the price of 3 and 4 letter .coms, but that came from Chinese investment and had nothing to do with the new names.

 

[xynames]

I'm getting thousand dollar and higher offers every single day on my dot coms, and closing sales regularly in minimum mid four figures, sometimes low to mid five figures. Granted my domains are in my opinion GREAT, but still I don't think I would be getting so many offers if I had some of these ersatz top level domains.

 

[GoKaizen]

If .COM was outlawed I would switch to .US, .ME, .UK, .EU, .IE, .DE, etc. over a new G.

you think that .com doing poorly means your nGTLDs sell. Not the case really. You could outlaw .coms and most business would shift to .net and ccTLDs and your .longwords would still not have value.

 

[DOMAIN ILLUMINATI]

.com is not the future.

 

[garptrader]

We are now down to about 20 million new TLDs from almost 30 million only six months ago (wow 9 million drops in six months). A portion of those were 1 cent to $1 promos but given the number of premium renewals on average new TLDs are probably not renewing at less than $10. The company I work for has a number of new TLDs but they don't even resolve - just trademark protection domains. Who know the true percentage but it is likely the vast majority of new TLDs are held by domain investors. We are now closing the fourth year of the new TLD program so many domains have gone through a renewal cycle or two. It may take 3-5 more years to see the numbers bottom out. In the meantime, new TLDs have consumed hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of domainer resources which otherwise could have been invested in the stock market, cryptocurrencies, legacy TLDs, precious metals, etc. So I would agree new TLDs have affected the .COM resale market.

 

[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.

 

[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

 

[jmcc]

We are now down to about 20 million new TLDs from almost 30 million only six months ago (wow 9 million drops in six months). A portion of those were 1 cent to $1 promos but given the number of premium renewals on average new TLDs are probably not renewing at less than $10.

There are some more implosions on the way in new gTLDs that used heavy discounting to drive registrations. However, it is not all doom and gloom. Some of the new gTLDs that have higher than .COM registrations fees have good renewal figures. Some of the Chinese gTLDs are highly speculative in nature and they depend heavily on discounting for their domain name counts.There are a few gTLDs that have become quite problematic due to the use of discounting. Development and usage has declined dramatically in these gTLDs and the quality of sites in these gTLDs is affecting renewals.

Regards...jmcc

 

[jmcc]

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.

Remember the Domain Tasting issue pre 2010? That's the environment that most of these brand gTLDs were worried about. Thousands of brand name domain names were being tasted each day and it wasn't economically feasible for the brand owners to take action against all of them. So there was an artificial demand and a strong economic argument for a brand gTLD. But ICANN introduced a "restocking fee" for domain tasting based on the number of Add Grace Period domains deleted each month. If the registry tasted more than a particular percentage, the fee kicked in and almost overnight, high volume domain tasting was killed off. Unfortunately the brand owners were locked into the application process and while major threat to their brands had subsided, most of the proceeded but did not really do anything with their gTLD.

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.

I am seeing some usage of new gTLDs in the surveys and a few of them are already showing similar levels of usage to non-core gTLDs. For early market gTLDs, that's quite good. However, a few of them are nowhere near such usage levels.

Regards...jmcc

 

[LovingLife]

I'm moving forward with the new gTLDS. Last month I had well over 3 million pageviews from sites using new gTLDS, this month is on track to double that. They rank well and people don't seem to be afraid to click on them when they show up in Google.

That is just my experience with these new names. Like I said before, I won't be paying a premium to get a .com for development, but I am still in the market to pick up decent .com and .org names for the right price.

 

[Josh R]

.Com is becoming more dominant... People that say otherwise are those without any decent .coms in their portfolio. (obviously they want to find reasons to bash the .com)

Alternatives like .Net are losing steam... Domains like .ME, .IO, .LY, have phases of being "fashionable" for startups, but they all end up buying the .com.

All these newbies trying to create a market for the gTLD's because they are the only domains that are easy to buy is just getting old... gTLDS failed.

Do your homework, work hard, and buy .com - It will continue to dominate... 99% of the people on NamePros will readily admit that if they were to start a real business, it would be on a .com domain...

 

[GoKaizen]

Or ccTLD.

99% of the people on NamePros will readily admit that if they were to start a real business, it would be on a .com domain...

 

[boker]

.Com is becoming more dominant... People that say otherwise are those without any decent .coms in their portfolio. (obviously they want to find reasons to bash the .com)

Alternatives like .Net are losing steam... Domains like .ME, .IO, .LY, have phases of being "fashionable" for startups, but they all end up buying the .com.

All these newbies trying to create a market for the gTLD's because they are the only domains that are easy to buy is just getting old... gTLDS failed.

Do your homework, work hard, and buy .com - It will continue to dominate... 99% of the people on NamePros will readily admit that if they were to start a real business, it would be on a .com domain...

.Com is becoming 'more dominant', that why the average daily sales for .com is at the lowest in 10 years, around 500$ the daily average, 5-6 times less than it was a few years ago. Also, you can't make a difference between .com registration number and .com sales, which are the lowest ever. Also, you should check Europe and most other countries outside US to see how .com is dominant at 5% to 15% and the list goes on and on.

 

[dordomai]

.Com is becoming 'more dominant', that why the average daily sales for .com is at the lowest in 10 years, around 500$ the daily average

A few weeks ago it was more than twice of that. You have the daily sales fluctuating A LOT all the time. Fairly misleading statement. How long has the average been $500, weeks?

It is not that the price is permanently settled at $500.

If you look at the number of sales each year in the past 3 years .com is fairly stable, while the new extensions declined significantly.

also not right to assume if .com sells less, the new extensions cause that.

Economy, market cycles, random movements matter more.

Many domainers sold assets cheap to invest in crypto that will have an effect as well.

we are now going towards the bottom of a market cycle.

.com IS the dominant global extension in the sense that you can have a website in .com and anyone in any language can understand it. ccTLDs have always been the first choice for local sites,nothing new here.

It is also the dominant extension for investing and this will never change.

.Com is becoming more dominant... People that say otherwise are those without any decent .coms in their portfolio. (obviously they want to find reasons to bash the .com)

Alternatives like .Net are losing steam... Domains like .ME, .IO, .LY, have phases of being "fashionable" for startups, but they all end up buying the .com.

All these newbies trying to create a market for the gTLD's because they are the only domains that are easy to buy is just getting old... gTLDS failed.

Do your homework, work hard, and buy .com - It will continue to dominate... 99% of the people on NamePros will readily admit that if they were to start a real business, it would be on a .com domain...

i don't know why people are so in denial about .com being the leading extension.
It is like they love to daydream how an unknown extension(they own) will take over and make .com obsolete. This will never happen. Like arguing that the US dollar is going away. Its not going to happen.

truth is(real world data) sales and regs are falling for the new Gs and are stable and growing for .com

does not take much to figure out the outcome of this.

if you offer someone here the choice between owning the .com for their site or the alternative, cost being equal they will take the .com in 99% of cases.

 

[boker]

A few weeks ago it was more than twice of that. You have the daily sales fluctuating A LOT all the time. Fairly misleading statement. How long has the average been $500, weeks?

It is not that the price is permanently settled at $500.

If you look at the number of sales each year in the past 3 years .com is fairly stable, while the new extensions actually declined.

Namebio is doing everything

...the line will go down for the last few years, exception being end of 2015 and beginning of 2016, when was the chinese thing. Yes, the daily average is fluctuating but around 8 out of 10 days is around 500$, so if you have 5 days averaging at 500$ and one at 800$-1000$, doesn't mean that the one day should be the standard. Also, if you check top 100 daily sales and remove the sales from namejet, dropcatch, snapnames and half of godaddy sales( expired domains) you will notice that the average sales number drop even more, around half of that. Also, you can check the number o sales reported by marketplaces used mostly by end users and sales reported by resellers marketplaces, compare it with a few years ago and check the results...70% of the sale are done by resellers and 30% by end users and 3-4 -10 years ago was exactly the other way.

 

[dordomai]

Namebio is doing everythingShow attachment 71705 ...the line will go down for the last few years, exception being end of 2015 and beginning of 2016, when was the chinese thing. Yes, the daily average is fluctuating but around 8 out of 10 days is around 500$, so if you have 5 days averaging at 500$ and one at 800$-1000$, doesn't mean that the one day should be the standard. Also, if you check top 100 daily sales and remove the sales from namejet, dropcatch, snapnames and half of godaddy sales( expired domains) you will notice that the average sales number drop even more, around half of that. Also, you can check the number o sales reported by marketplaces used mostly by end users and sales reported by resellers marketplaces, compare it with a few years ago and check the results...70% of the sale are done by resellers and 30% by end users and 3-4 -10 years ago was exactly the other way.

reported .com sales are stable around 60k each year no change here. regs are still growing.

also sales are not going to the new Gs as evidenced by the low number of startups using it and low number of sales.

If you think less sales are happening there must be an other cause.

I have been using a lot of webservices and they invariably use .com, with some going to .io in the past years. I have seen no change as an internet user in the past 17 years.

i think when the internet was smaller and more fragmented, category killers were more authoritative, just having the name could make you king in a niche. These days a lot goes to large brands which use their brand name instead of a generic so I think exact match names were worth more in the past. we are seeing more brandable sales but the extension that everyone wanted or used is and was always .com no change here in the past 20 years.

.com has been declared dead several times in the past 20 years. It always came back. The market is cyclical.

the current weekly average price is $4k and over 1k most of the time

 

[boker]

reported .com sales are stable around 60k each year no change here. regs are still growing.

also sales are not going to the new Gs as evidenced by the low number of startups using it and low number of sales.

If you think less sales are happening there must be an other cause.

I have been using a lot of webservices and they invariably use .com, with some going to .io in the past years. I have seen no change as an internet user.

The earlier was a response meant to the other guy saying that .com sales are rising. Also, I have tested the sales from last week, around 1500 sales all together, if you take out namejet and the other 3-4 reseller marketplaces, will remain around 850, but that' includes all sales from godaddy, flippa, and a few others, that everybody knows that a lot of them are reseller sales as well, so probably a fair number will be around 450 end user sales out of 1500. Also, maybe the 60k sales number is right, but my impression is that all the end user sales until 2015( more exactly 2011) have helped resellers accumulate lot's of cash and they are the one's now spending their money to buy cheap,( that why they represent 70% of the sales) hopping that it's just for a period and then the sales will go up again, but I think that after more than a year of drop they have spent most of the cash and if nothing will change they will have lot's of great .com's, but nobody to sell them at the right price to make a profit and with no cash to spend anymore. If you follow the big portofolio holders, you will notice exactly that they have bought thousands and tens of thousands of domains..but in the last two months they have started dropping. If the prices will go way up soon, they will make a nice profit, but if they will remain like this for a few months more, they will start loosing big.

 

[dordomai]

The earlier was a response meant to the other guy saying that .com sales are rising. Also, I have tested the sales from last week, around 1500 sales all together, if you take out namejet and the other 3-4 reseller marketplaces, will remain around 850, but that' includes all sales from godaddy, flippa, and a few other, that everybody knows that a lot of them are reseller sales as well, so probably a fair number will be around 450 end user sales out of 1500. Also, maybe the 60k sales number is right, but my impression is that all the end user sales until 2015( more exactly 2011) have helped resellers accumulate lot's of cash and they are the one's now spending their money to buy cheap,( that why they represent 70% of the sales) hopping that it's just for a period and then the sales will go up again, but I think that after more than a year of drop they have spent most of the cash and if nothing will change they will have lot's of great .com's, but nobody to sell them at the right price to make a profit and with no cash to spend anymore. If you follow the big portofolio holders, you will notice exactly that they have bought thousands and tens of thousands of domains..but in the last two months they have started dropping. If the prices will go way up soon, they will make a nice profit, but if they will remain like this for a few months more, they will start loosing big.

personally I don't care about what happens in this week or next. As long as development happens under .com there will be sales. It will go up and down over time but as long .com is king most sales will be there.

 

[boker]

personally I don't care about what happens in this week or next. As long as development happens under .com there will be sales. It will go up and down over time but as long .com is king most sales will be there.

Everybody decides for himself and for sure there will be .com sales one year from now and 5 years from now, but it's important also what will be the average price, because if you pay 1k for a good domain now and you will be able to sell it for 1k or just 500$ -600$ in 2-3 years, than you will have to loose money or keep it forever. So it's important where the market is going and what prices you will get for your domains. The same happened after 2012, lot's of domainers lost money, selling for a lot less then what they have paid in 2008-2011, the big luck was the chinese thing, saving a lot of them. I'm curious what will save now the one's making the wrong bets.

 

[Larry_Luc]

500 USD ?