.COM will lose ground to xxxx.travel xxxx.news xxxx.ibm xxxx.mcdonalds?

[mathewka010]

Hi All NP'ers,

Having researched a little on the progression and development of ICANN's new proposal for TOP LEVEL DOMAINS- xxxx.weather xxxx.ibm xxxx.jobs xxxx.australia are we now going to see a new leader in the race for technology success!

Im currently in two minds and would love to hear everyones thoughts!

Thanks Mat

 

[domainfool]

It's never gonna happen. Some of those have already been released and we haven't seen anything from them

 

[Jaco]

My prediction is these names will be another repreat of the past, totally different, yet some somehow totally the same with much the same types of people investing (those who missed out perviously). It is a new set of extensions designed for selling "the dream" to domainers, it will be marketed mainly to domainers and cared about mainly by domainers. It will have a negative effect on .com, but only due to small numbers of co's using them, just like .cc, .tv, .info and .mobi.

See, that's the thing.
What ICANN is proposing isn't a "new set of names". They're proposing a total paradigm shift where relevant keyword structure is made into its own TLD platform. This just isn't comparable to what they did in the past with idiotic "new TLDs" which themselves were simply a profit driven retooling of existing, established concepts.

This is totally different, totally new.

It's like the Wright Brothers being at Kitty Hawk and people comparing their airplane to a hang glider, because that's all they've seen thus far. It may fly, it may not, but one thing's for sure- it isn't comprable to anything that's been done in the past, so lets stop making stupid comparisons to .biz and .tel, because Finkle ain't Einhorn.

 

[nicedomains]

See, that's the thing.
What ICANN is proposing isn't a "new set of names". They're proposing a total paradigm shift where relevant keyword structure is made into its own TLD platform. This just isn't comparable to what they did in the past with idiotic "new TLDs" which themselves were simply a profit driven retooling of existing, established concepts.

This is totally different, totally new.

It's like the Wright Brothers being at Kitty Hawk and people comparing their airplane to a hang glider, because that's all they've seen thus far. It may fly, it may not, but one thing's for sure- it isn't comprable to anything that's been done in the past, so lets stop making stupid comparisons to .biz and .tel, because Finkle ain't Einhorn.

This is how I believe ICANN is looking at the unlimited gTLD release as well. I am going to quote Kieran McCarthy - ICANN General Manager of Public Participation from a response of his to some concerns I raised regarding gTLDs:

Hi Mike,

Well, I would firstly question whether the gTLDs released in 2000 and 2003 are a “failure”.

What is success in this space? Is it number of domains? If so, .info and .biz are doing very well with two million and five million each.

The second round of gTLDs were specifically sponsored TLDs - or sTLDs. Their aim was to represent a certain community. And many of them are very happy with what they have.

This is the Internet and so it is a vast global mirror to society. And society comprises mostly of small groups, with very few large groups.

What the gTLD expansion that ICANN is making possible will do is enable the Internet to more accurately reflect its global use by allowing new areas of the domain name system to be created according to the demand for it.

Why doesn’t ICANN want to be in charge of deciding how the Internet evolves in terms of deciding on precise Internet extensions? Because to try to control how the Internet evolves is, in the worst case, to damage its evolution, and in the best case, to try to hold back the tide.

My personal view is that our kids are going to laugh at us in 10 years time when we keep trying to add “.com” to Internet addresses. Then we will bore them to death about how the Internet used to be.

Yes, our early Internet generation will be confused. And then we’ll learn to deal with it - just as we have learnt to deal with cell phones and remote controls and computers and online banking and a change in the road system where we live and every other inevitable small change in our lives.

But note that being confused won’t mean that the Internet that we know now goes away - it will just become a smaller part of a bigger Internet.

In the meantime, a world of new possibilities will open up in the same way that cell phones and computers and the Internet itself have make our lives immeasurably better.

That’s how I see it anyway.

Kieren

I thought it was interesting... but maybe too far ahead of itself.

My argument against allowing unlimited gTLDs to be released lies in performance of past extensions, new registry stability, and the negative effect it may have on existing ccTLD's.

Dongsman, why shouldn't we compare these to sTLD's like .travel, .jobs, .museum ?? These new extensions were created because it seemed they were generic enough to really make a splash and capture some of the actual commerce that takes place online in these industries. Have they? NO. You simply don't see commercials for .jobs sites you see them for brandable names like monster.com or careerbuilder.com.. Just think about how .com dominates the online travel industry. Did .travel take any market share away from .com sites? If it did it was negligible..

 

[bmugford]

I agree with all points. Rep Left.

Brad

Most .coms are barely developed, hardly developed, half-ass developed, parked, etc.....and non-stop progress to make them better has been underway for over a 15 years, and yet we are still just beginning.

It's been a phenomenal undertaking by millions of people to just get .com where it is at now. Why would any other extension gain critical mass when .com can barely do it on its own? Development is so freakin' tedious and hard, why spend that effort on another extension? There will never be enough folks to do it.
.

 

[exponent]

A billion stupid little extensions only increases the value of quality .com domains.

 

[akcampbell]

A billion stupid little extensions only increases the value of quality .com domains.

In your signature, you say "Free Professional Profile". On the title of your Gradbase site you say "Connecting Students, Graduates, and Professionals". Gradbase is a database of student and graduate profiles for social networking with professionals.

Can you not, even in a tiny way, appreciate the beauty of an alternative extension like .pro that produces domains like Profile.pro, Student.pro, Graduate.pro, Social.pro, and Database.pro? All mine, by chance.

Why not underline the purpose of your site with a keyword and the extension rather than just a fusion of two keywords in .com?

 

[MicroGuy]

Why would any other extension gain critical mass when .com can barely do it on its own? Development is so freakin' tedious and hard, why spend that effort on another extension?

Exactly. In addition, the majority of end-users associate .COM with being THE gold standard in URL destinations. If you develop somesite.pro for example, you are simply adding value and traffic to somesite.com. IMO.

 

[dakjjim]

The release of gTLD's will create so much more confusion then there is already, and that can only be good for .COM.

 

[snoop]

Zuriko also sold Tour.pro, Booking.pro, Claim.pro, and Claims.pro for $X,XXX+, again all registered in mid 07. Another NP member, MJS, sold Video.pro for $35,000, Stream.pro for $11,000, Streaming.pro for $18,000 and Movie.pro for $22,000. These were regged in early 05 and sold in Mar 07.

So all in all we have 2-3 people who have made money from the extension?

All the video sales to the same buyer on the same date were a bit of luck, from what I remember most (all?) of those names were later allowed to expire along with video.us which that buyer paid 75k for. It is the beauty.cc of the .pro world - probably nobody will ever make sense of it. The .us people used to make a big deal of the video.us sale, until it was left to expire and was reauctioned for 18k.

Why is it so difficult for you to accept that for somebody who didn't hand reg .coms in the mid to late 1990s, it may actually be easier to sell Casino.anything than the utter rubbish that is left in .com after 80m+ picks.

To be honest I don't know alot of people in the industry today who are making money because they "hand reg .coms in the mid to late 1990s", it is the very small minority-maybe a dozen or so people.

As far as casino.anything goes, if the reg fee is low it is probably a good strategy, though I can't imagine any names like that still available, it isn't comparable to hand registering names in .com if the name is not available in .pro.

---------- Post added at 05:33 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:22 PM ----------

Everyone keeps saying that there are no good .coms left to register.

I tend to to think it doesn't mean much and never did. Was there good .com's left to register in 2007? how about 2005? 2002? 2000?, 1998?....1995? Only in hindsight do people think it.

The here and now is there is probably not many valuable .com's available to register, that was probably the case in 1995 (I just guessing as I wasn't there). If there is money lying on the floor it will be picked up. Give it 5 years and people may well see today quite different, that is generally how things have gone over time, the money was never obvious and never easy. The "good names" of today were likely the mediocre names of the past. Indeed the whole area of domains would have had no money in it at some point.

---------- Post added at 05:38 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:33 PM ----------

My argument against allowing unlimited gTLDs to be released lies in performance of past extensions, new registry stability, and the negative effect it may have on existing ccTLD's.

Does that matter? If these domains end out being worth very little money and also devalue .com and cc tlds is that a bad thing or a good thing? Take the domainer hat off for a minute and consider it. The whole point of new extensions is to give more choice - that is what the argument has always been. Basically what is good for the Internet/general public may not be good for domainers, in fact is may be the opposite. The "ideal world" is probably a world where domain prices are driven down because of so much choice.

 

[snoop]

If I had to guess I would say it is more around 60 to 80 investors that were out to register as many primo domains as they could. Outside that, there were many others registering one, two, or three domains and such.

So given that it is still low numbers of people.

A lot of registrants were held back by the $100 fees for domains in which there was no form of monetization to support them. Folks could not see how to make their money back. That is why there were not more registrants.

I think that is the the thing, whilst the names were available to register they probably had no value.

The power is all in the domains and that is where it is at.........unless you want to trade your time for development.

Agree.

 

[Jaco]

I tend to to think it doesn't mean much and never did. Was there good .com's left to register in 2007? how about 2005? 2002? 2000?, 1998?....1995? Only in hindsight do people think it.

The here and now is there is probably not many valuable .com's available to register, that was probably the case in 1995 (I just guessing as I wasn't there). If there is money lying on the floor it will be picked up. Give it 5 years and people may well see today quite different, that is generally how things have gone over time, the money was never obvious and never easy. The "good names" of today were likely the mediocre names of the past. Indeed the whole area of domains would have had no money in it at some point.

Using readily available data, I cobbled up a little chart of year over year .com, .net and .org registrations.

You can pretty much look at the chart and identify the point where the "good names" were all gone and dumb names started to rule the hand-reg day.
Frank Schilling surmises there are 11mm "good" names out there, which just so happens to be almost exactly where .net is today. That makes sense.

 

[snoop]

You can pretty much look at the chart and identify the point where the "good names" were all gone and dumb names started to rule the hand-reg day.

I'm scratching my head. How does the chart demonstarate when all the "good names" went?

 

[nameboi]

Human brain just can not remember word before .something
The only name like that I remember after well over 10 years of using internet is mail.yahoo.com.
Any company trying to market word.something will find out real quick nobody can remember their name.
Companies that do anything other than seo-optimized spam want their customers to remember their domains.
Many webmasters and some domainers have what I see as distorted view of reality when any domain that a customer wants to go to is somehow magically found via link or bookmarks.

 

[HeyNow]

2002: .us This is the first real challenge to .com. Cctlds are the main extension in many countries around the world. How could this not get popular?

Your timeline is wrong. .Us was around and utilized long before 2002. Only in 2002 was .us available to anyone. Before that, municipalities, cities, and states utilized it. For example, the City of Chicago utilized (and still does) CI.CHI.IL.US. before 2002. They now forward it to CITYOFCHICAGO.ORG. Back then they didn't see the wisdom in acquiring and using CHICAGO.US, which is now a fledgling news site.

 

[mathewka010]

Still, unlimited gTLD's is very very very interesting; people in the domain community are generally sticking their fingers in their ears and shouting "LALALALALA" rather than making a cool analysis of what might happen. Of course, based on what drop lists look like, I'm convinced the "domain community" is filled with idiots to begin with, which is a beautiful thing. Wherever idiots with money are found, there is profit to be had

Dongsman you are spot on!

Mat

 

[AdoptableDomains]

.com will not lose ground to anything as long as we are using domains as we know them today. Adding the ability of anyone with lots of money to start a domain will dilute everything but .com though, probably effecting info and biz more than the ccTLD's.

There is talk that there could be thousands of new TLD's, but I really don't see that happening. Companies aren't going to get their own TLD as many suggest (.mcdonalds) as it is just too expensive and pointless unless they can sell tens of thousands of second level domain on the TLD to make it worthwhile. Most who could afford it already have the .com and are happy with that. Maybe a few social sites like facebook .fbk or twitter .twit :D might benefit by selling users a short custom URL, but I think that will be limited, and you could forward any other domain to a longer URL already.

I think there could be a few moderately successful generic ones like maybe .blog, .video, or similar names that can help target content or formatting similar to what .mobi does. Even those don't really give much advantage over what's already available. The ones who now strictly enforced content sTLD's have not been very successful in terms of actual use or recognition as they limit their sales (think .jobs, .travel, .aero, .coop). The ones who don't enforce at all (think .biz, .info, .net) don't give users that content search advantage and become just another TLD.

If this does happen (I hope Icann comes to their senses), I predict we won't see thousands of new TLD's, but maybe a couple dozen. Most won't attract end users for primary use, but will be parked for income or parked on .com's as keyword URL's, limiting their resale value to two or three figures except the most prime keywords.

Any large number of new TLD's would also have trouble getting registrars to pick all of them up, so they wouldn't be very universal in being able to transfer or consolidate to your favorite registrar.

 

[GreenGambler]

One good thing about this, IMO is that it costs soo much to own one of these extensions, $200,000 I think? At least that will limit the new TLDs that are being registered, for now, until the price drops.

I don't really like the idea of these new TLD's much and think it's just gonna dilute the net even more. And who's to say one ext is better than the other at finding the info you need. Let's say you have a sick dog and want info on how to help your dog get better. What ext. should I visit? .pet, .pets, .dog, .canine, .k9, .vet, .vetranarian, .sick? Or do I just let Google decide, .google. Where does it end?

And what does this do for shorter .cc names? Less characters to type, quicker to find what you want maybe?

Or how about if I want to register .a. I think that would be a good extension, short and quick to type.
Why not .a, .b, .c, .d, .e, .f, .g, .h, .0, .1, .2, .3 I want to own a.a.

 

[domainsusi]

You just google 'sick dog'
The most likely sites will be dot com.

Dot com will continue to be king - no matter what fancy and expensive extensions are out there to register. The common man surfing the web is going to look for and click the dotcom.

 

[exponent]

Can you not, even in a tiny way, appreciate the beauty of an alternative extension like .pro that produces domains like Profile.pro, Student.pro, Graduate.pro, Social.pro, and Database.pro? All mine, by chance.

Why not underline the purpose of your site with a keyword and the extension rather than just a fusion of two keywords in .com?

I own the .com and the .mobi extensions. For me, it's all about the "radio test". If I spend thousands on advertising (I don't, gradbase is currently just a proof of concept project) then people might remember bits and pieces of the advert (perhaps only "GradBase"). Most people try the .com extension first and if that doesn't work, they'll Google it.

Similarly, Google doesn't treat ccTLD domains fairly, but Bing does but unfortunately, 70% of people still use Google's crap search. I have a 20 year plan for each domain I develop (or acquire for development). Some may set idle for 10 years before I do anything, others may sit partially developed while I test and improve concepts through trial and error.

Extensions like .info .coop and .pro could be so much more, but until the day they have a fighting chance, I'll stick with .com. I would rather spend a mint on a great .com that will eventually pay for itself than spend a fortune trying to get people to remember whatever .pro

For me, its strictly business.

 

[akcampbell]

.com won't lose ground to other extensions but it will become more acceptable to develop generic keywords in alternative extensions. Somebody will come along within 5 years with extensions that are free to register, maybe in return for signing up for a broadband or hosting service.

PPC will virtually disappear. Search engine algorithms will take less notice of keywords and periods of continuous registrations and more notice of content quality than they do now. The internet will get so congested that functionality, design and SEO will become relatively even more important, reducing the significance of domain names altogether.

The worst thing you can do to make things change quickly is make alot of money with little efffort. High .com prices push developers into other extensions. Just as early .com developers shunned premium keywords and developed made up site names like FaceBook, MySpace, eBay, Bebo, Google etc, the next generation of developers will register whatever extension is cheap and start coding. Companies will still pursue premium .coms for seven figure sums as trophies and superbrands but the .com landscape will look like a very high mountain with just a little bit of snow on top, basically like it does now but with even less snow at the top.

 

[verbster]

The next successful extension will be .blog

 

[MicroGuy]

The worst thing you can do to make things change quickly is make a lot of money with little effort.

When I read comments like this, it makes be wonder why I even bother visiting this forum. IMO.

 

[Kate]

The next successful extension will be .blog

The term will probably be outdated in a few years.
Good TLDs should not be time-sensitive.

When you look at the fiasco of post-2000 extensions like .coop .aero .museum the prospects look bleak. Most people are only familiar with a handful TLDs and their own ccTLD. There are 240+ TLDs active, add another 200 if you will, most people would still be unaware.

 

[h2o]

Lonely Little Islands

I own the .com and the .mobi extensions. For me, it's all about the "radio test".

For investment purposes, the only extension I like is .web. For one, it sounds "crisp and clear." It passes the radio test. We live in "Web" 2.0 not "Net" 2.0. If someone mentions Cars.Web, even non tech savvy people know such a string of words relates to an online destination. I can't say the same for Cars.Auto. Also, such an extension matches all keywords. The same can't be said for a name like insurance.pet. Anybody who invests in a extension like .pet or .food is only wasting money on a lonely island that will never gain universal traction

The key is having *UNIVERSAL* keywords to gain *MAINSTREAM* success. You want an extension that will be be synonymous with the digital world. You don't want to be lost on your lonely niche island of .cat, .eco, or .eat. .COM was successful because of its universal appeal. In my personal opinion, .Web is the only real competition to .Com. Even semi-tempting names like .blog, .video, and .xxx may gain moderate success in their respective niche, but will not create the "buzz" that speculators are looking for. In fact, I would think .US is buzz-worthy with the US being such a huge player in the digital front. But, hunches are not always right.

Most of the extensions will be lonely little islands.

 

[Giode]

I'm one of those, but I think the number is higher than that Snoop. I personally know of three guys that I still keep in touch with and not a one of them has ever been to a show, made a single post anywhere, and is not involved in the industry in any capacity other than parking their names and living comfortably. They are just out of sight. The story on DNJournal about Michael Berkens tells how he was unheard of until 2004, yet he owns something like 67,000 domains.

I know one guy that makes $1,500 a day off of one domain that gets 8,000 daily uniques of direct navigation. Another gets 10,000 direct navigation uniques a day off of one domain and sells leads at $10 a pop......he has literally been on permanent vacation for three years now. Nobody has ever heard of them.

If I had to guess I would say it is more around 60 to 80 investors that were out to register as many primo domains as they could. Outside that, there were many others registering one, two, or three domains and such. A lot of registrants were held back by the $100 fees for domains in which there was no form of monetization to support them. Folks could not see how to make their money back. That is why there were not more registrants.

I spoke to a lot of those guys back then and I have never heard a peep out of most of them since.

I think the big rush really came in 1997-1998, and more big time investors really showed up in 1999 and 2000.

Even still, most of us who hand regged domains back then did not get enough of them to make a ton of money. It's those who NEVER stopped regging that really made the money by keeping their blinders on and doing what worked, instead of being distracted with development or other projects. Many of those that went the development route ended up at an dead end alley, but some did well.

The power is all in the domains and that is where it is at.........unless you want to trade your time for development.
.

Reading this makes me a little nauseous. Great post though!

I remember back in the mid 90's while in High School, my father introducing domain names to me. He knew quit a bit about them, marketing online since early 1994, and even once owned Ghostwriter.com (he now owns TheGhostwriter.com instead) and Grow.com, which he accidentally let expire. He even tried to enthusiastically get me interested in registering some, but it was of no interest apparently. I just remember so vividly him telling me I should register a few since they were going fast. What was I thinking!

Anyway, I always think back to those days anytime I see the old school guys reminisce.