i just find it interesting how everybody is so sure of themselves about this..
nothing is 100% sure, when it comes to speculative things like domains. even .com domains can be worthless in 10 years. But, some predictions are probably more likely to happen than others.
most of this being based on a dozen TLD's being released over a dozen years..
at least the prediction that the new TLDs won't be that successful is based on certain kind of past experience. Even if the conditions of the past experience are not 100% similar to the conditions of upcoming events (1000s of new TLDs vs fewer TLDs in the past).
we could look at the angle that it makes sense nobody has heard of any of these with there being so few in existence.
Agree. This can be a different angle of view.
before we can even have the discussion about whether any certain 1 or 2 new gTLD's will be "successful" people have to know they exist as a whole. most domainers think that will never happen based on a dozen gTLD's being released over the last dozen years - sooo, the discussion makes the assumption that none of these businesses will do effective enough promotion of any of the 1,000's of TLD's that are about to exist in this new right-of-the-dot world, where any world is a TLD.
result = more than X
where X = chances of promotion by internet giants
X before gTLDs was only about a dozen
But on what exactly is the opposite view and prediction (success) based? Promo power of some Registrars and TLD operators for a short period of time which will magically change the habbits, confidence in established extension of billions of endusers (i intentionally exlude the "intranet" domainers market, since this market has no bright future anyway IMO and both the success or flop of this market is only for a short period of time and will probably be irrelevant soon).
Ok lets forget the other crap TLDs in the past and their flops.
Take the .us extension for instance.
Jesus christ, that is the reputable COUNTRY CODE TLD of USA with the power of neustar, all the godaddy promo and special .us price and active since more than a decade and still almost no one in US is interested in it, americans think .com is their extension.
I am not a .com fetishist or something, i have some personal preferences that differ from those of most other people who only like .com (for instance i very much like .us and .info extensions), but also i had to learn that (unfortunately) the market and endusers don't give a damn what i like or dislike.