discuss Here's why .XYZ will fail

[william]

There has been a lot of hype lately for .xyz because of a small number of big sales. I see a lot of people overextending themselves and pouring a lot of their budget in this extension. Personally, I believe .xyz is doomed to fail. Maybe I'll eat my words, maybe I won't. Here is my case for why I think .xyz will fail:

1) Low number of sales

According to Namebio.com, in the last two years there have been only 867 sales. Only 359 of those have been over $1,000. Yes, these are only reported sales, but unimpressive none the less. Now, compare this with the number of .xyz registered in the past two years, and this number will seem even more minuscule. Most of the names that sold were also premium one word names.

2) No space for innovation

Which brings me to my next point. Because domainers are rushing to register every single available .xyz domain that is decent, it leaves little space for businesses to set up under the extension and promote the extension. This exposure is crucial in order for the TLD to grow. It's getting to the point where you can't find a decent two word .xyz and that's not because they are taken by businesses. Which will certainly stunt its growth.

3) It's ugly

Aesthetically and phonetically .xyz is ugly. It's three syllables, unlike .com, .me, .net, .co... Which makes it harder to say. It looks horrible when it's part of a design or even just typing it. It feels cheap.

4) People don't trust it

Because of all the reasons above and the cheap initial registration costs, there aren't enough legitimate businesses using the extension and there are lot of spammy sites. Starting to type in Google "is .xyz" gives a first suggestion of "is .xyz safe". Same goes for ".xyz domain" (third suggestion).

5) It's not early

I know many of you will say that it's still early for .xyz. But it isn't. It has been around since 2014. It had some initial hype because of Google using it and that hype hasn't materialized. I don't think it ever will.

That's just my two cents. What do you guys think?

 

[DNGear]

Did you know your up to 150 K in xyz sales a week is a “small” amount of sales? If that is a downward trajectory I want to see what the opposite looks like. (Glad you have a sense of humor about this too.)

My .xyz sales already reached 400K in 22 days. Let them troll and get peace.

 

[johnn]

As a business man I don't really care much about the hype or the future.
As long as I get in and out at the right time and make some profit.
I think many people losing money because they think too much and dig the hole too big.
I am simple and don't dig hole.

 

[redemo]

Well, the op has just given an arbitrary reason for it, nothing data back up.

Disagree.

So consider he is not trolling here is my answer 1 to 5 answers:
1) No, it’s high number of sales this year which Bob has given the report.

Not high number of sales in comparison to .com. Don't say it's new. Was launched in 2014. Not a new extension. Younger than .com but eight years isn't new.

2) Huge space for innovation compared to .com, find a decent .com name is a nightmare.

Could say that about most extensions. Not an argument unique to .xyz. Also there are many .com available to register and buy cheap. So also not an argument for .xyz.

3) It's cool

Subjective opinion, confusing and pointless isn't cool.

It looks sharp & clean all the letters tipped with vertices, those letters fits XR VR AR in looking.

You are actually joking now right? Saying xr.com is worse looking than xr.xyz is like saying a diamond looks worse than a steaming pile of sheep pooh. What is sharp and clean about xr.xyz. Not an argument.

4) People should trust it, according to spamhaus report .com is worse than .xyz.
(The lower % the better)
Ps. .xyz registry did a very good job on anti spamming.

But they don't trust it. Google and see. Xyz is NOT TRUSTED by the general public. Same as .biz.

5) It’s a true new generic tld for wide international purposes, .com only stands for commercial, company.

Absolute nonsense. Dot com can be used for anything. Dot xyz can only be used for weird things like poltergeist movie fan clubs and magic mushroom cult tribes.

And if you don’t mind and considering I am not trolling, here is why .com will fail:
1) It looks old.

Established versus failed. Dot com versus dot xyz.

2) can’t find any good 2 even 3 words to reg.

Not true. Not an argument. You pay $ 100 many available. You are making up facts to suit your argument.

3) New Generations especially Z don’t like it.

Who did you ask some stone skaters in the park?

4) Too expensive for new start up.

Subjective. Depends on budget. Can buy for $ 100 or $ 1000 or just invent a brand and buy for $ 10. So also not an argument.

5) Many junk email as well.

So both sunshine and rain are weather. What are you saying two wrongs make one wrong right? Not an argument.

6) big number registered means nothing for future perspectives, even Nokia has fallen.

Saying .com might fall has nothing to do with .xyz having already fallen. Only domainers and a handful of cryptos and nerds are using .xyz. Not saying anything bad about nerds. But your general arguments don't hold much weight. Not trolling .xyz just saying it's a trend wave that will soon hit the beach and be replaced by another trend wave. Maybe .abc or something.

 

[inforg]

I've been around for over 20 years doing this profitably as a sideline. Some people will make money on any extension that comes out. The vast majority won't make anything regardless of the extension. If you like it, register/buy it. If you don’t, then move on.

But be aware a lot of us have suffered through .biz, .us, .ws, and .mobi and every other new extension that gets hyped and disappears. We don't want to gamble again if we feel we have better odds elsewhere.

If another extension actually becomes established, then I will trade it.

Until then, this is the same thread I've seen 100 times about all the others. someone should dig them up for a laugh.

Congrats to DNgear, who appears to be successfully riding the wave. if I was serious about .xyz, id be trying to reverse engineer her competitive advantage. I’m sure it isn’t lottery ticket luck

 

[DNGear]

 

[wallet2it]

One simply analogy:
.com is like apple or Facebook stocks
Very expensive, stable growth, less volatile

.xyz is like new ipo emerging market stocks

Very cheap but very volatile but potentially very very high return rate

It’s all about risk management

 

[Bob Hawkes]

Much could be written, but here is short form of my response to the 5 points made by the OP.

According to Namebio.com, in the last two years there have been only 867 sales. Only 359 of those have been over $1,000. Yes, these are only reported sales, but unimpressive none the less.

It is true that still way fewer .xyz sales than .com. However, on forums people tend to discuss largely trends and changes. In just the first 3 weeks of 2022 the sales dollar volume (a better measure of retail than number of sales) in .xyz is about the same as .net and .org TLDs combined, or in all country code domains, both generic and national, combined. I do not agree it is an unimpressive sales record, but we each can have our own opinion.

Because domainers are rushing to register every single available .xyz domain that is decent, it leaves little space for businesses to set up under the extension and promote the extension

I disagree about the hand-registration availability of 2-word or brandable .xyz, but even if that premise was true, is that not exactly the situation we want as domainers? We are seeing startup owners paying 4 and 5 figures for strong .xyz single-word domain names on the aftermarket. Surely we want that?

Aesthetically and phonetically .xyz is ugly.

I know you are not alone in saying that, but one advantage that .xyz has is that it is not sector (like many new gTLDs) or language (like almost all gTLDs) specific. Only about 4.8% of the world speaks English as their native language. It is always important to judge aesthetically in a broad way. Some find the the simple order of .xyz aesthetically pleasing. Not everyone does.

4) People don't trust it

I think this is the most important point. The adoption by Alphabet and especially the rebranding of Block.xyz (Square and other allied businesses) will help build trust. Nevertheless there are definitely some bad actors on .xyz, and a general lack of familiarity with the TLD, especially in the USA. IF the payment processor used by millions of tiny businesses stress that they are part of block.xyz, it will help the TLD build trust. But time will tell. I personally think the TLD would be better if they did not discount first year so extensively.

But it isn't. It has been around since 2014. It had some initial hype because of Google using it and that hype hasn't materialized. I don't think it ever will.

It is not particularly new, agreed. It has gone through various phases - the initial premium surge, then the penny offer years ago, gradual adoption in some markets but limited aftermarket, then in last couple of years, and especially last year, strong growth in significant aftermarket sales and rapid development of many of those sales, mainly by web3 companies.

Just my opinion.

Bob

 

[Henry Y]

In response to the OP, below is the pros of .xyz that I know.

1) End user adoptions
End user adoptions is the major and biggest driver of survival of a domain extension. In recent years, more and more web3 companies are using .xyz for their blockchain, crypto, DeFi, DAO and metaverse businesses. The well-known cases include Block.xyz, Spiral.xyz, Mirror.xyz, etc. The reason is that .xyz is the first DNS domain extension that can be integrated with ENS. This provides .xyz a first mover advantage and that's why in web3 entrepreneurs' minds, .xyz is associated with web3.

Let see what some end users think about .xyz:
Agora DAO: “We chose .xyz because it symbolizes decentralization and the new wave of Web3 applications."
Matcha: using the .xyz web extension gave it many more naming options.
Dune: It allowed for a more concise web address.
(Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/28/wtf-is-xyz/)

Based on what the end users said, .xyz gave them more possibilities. It is a totally opposite story to what the OP said that .xyz has no space for innovation.

Of course, the usage of .xyz is not limited to web3 companies. There are also 3D companies, traditional business companies and individuals who are using .xyz. For more examples, please visit https://gen.xyz/live.

2) Upward trend of reported sales
Trend is important to forecast the future. There is no way to use a single time point or interval to predict the future, let alone to make any conclusions. Any opinion about the future without using trend analysis is unfound.
According to Namebio, the year-on-year sales comparisons from 2020 to 2022 (projected) are as below:

• Number of sales: 96 (-%) -> 568 (+492%) -> 3,253 (+473%) (projected, calculated from 205 as of 23 Jan / 23 * 365)
• Dollar volume: $108.2K (-%) -> $1.9M (+1656%) -> $10,549K (+455%) (projected, calculated from $664.7K as of 23 Jan / 23 * 365)

As now is still in very early 2022, the projected 2022 figures may have big difference with the final actual 2022 figures. Yet, there is no doubt that the trend of reported sales is significantly increasing. There is no sign that the increasing trend will stop or suddenly turn to decreasing trend.

Drill down the reported sales to see more, there are end user sales that the sold domains have been developed into websites. For details, you can see the following thread and post:
Credit to @equity78: https://www.namepros.com/threads/10...-a-live-website-a-look-at-the-buyers.1262828/
Credit to @alienbaba: https://www.namepros.com/threads/sa...-xyz-domain-sales.1264011/page-2#post-8504693

3) Unique feature
The .xyz has a unique feature related to NFT that other domain extensions do not have, making it one step ahead to the web3 world. By simply adding ".xyz" at the end of .eth addresses in web browsers (such as nick.eth.xyz), profile pages of NFT collectors will be shown.

As NFT is hot now that many people and companies are getting involved in NFT investments, the unique feature makes .xyz grab more awareness in the public, which is expected to help increase popularity and adoptions in the future.

4) Big room for growth
.Xyz was launched in 2014. It took 5 years for doing promotions to get awareness (i.e. the Introduction stage of Product Life Cycle). It started getting adoptions by end uers in the recent 2-3 years. Based on the current sales trend and end user adoptions trend, we can see that .xyz is now at the Introduction or Growth stage. It has a big room for further growth, given that it is associated with web3, and web3 is the future and still at the Introduction or Growth stage.

5) Improvement in being used in spam websites
.Xyz was used for spamming some years ago. However, the XYZ Registry has put effort to reduce the issue as shown in the table below (Source: https://www.spamhaus.org/news/article/817/spamhaus-botnet-threat-update-q4-2021).

Also, according to Spamhaus (https://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/tlds/), as of 24 Jan 2022, .xyz has a bad score of 0.23 with 2.6% bad domains, while the mostly used .com has a bad score of 0.55 with 4.5% bad domains. The lower the score, the better the extension. So, .xyz is even better than .com in this aspect. Trust in .xyz is hence now being built, which is reflected by the increasing adoptions of .xyz by end users.

 

[DNGear]

Nowadays,We don't even know who has been catching all the .xyz.

I guess, There would be plenty of chances to catch them if they spread negativity and there wouldn't be enough competition.
Btw, Did any of these XYZ naysayers show their domain portfolio's? Without knowing these facts why would anyone believe their real intention or belief or blindness.
Their motto is pretty simple. Whatever we say or some research enthusiasts(@Bob Hawkes ) say they won't bother or listen. Because they knew it they were doing it wantedly.
https://www.namepros.com/blog/past-12-months-of-xyz-a-look-at-the-data.1264760/

It just reminds me of, one cannot straighten a dog's tail.
I believe in god.
God bless you.

 

[Bob Hawkes]

Speaking of hyping, can I promote my article (balanced in my view, but well that is my view ) Catching Trains and Avoiding Train Wrecks. While it was written prior to the .xyz recent rise, and not specifically on that TLD at all, I think the points hold across any TLD.

The article mentions many things, such as the relationship between risk and reward, whether it is the right time or already too late, etc. Here is a part:

Where Is This Train Going?

While none of us can precisely predict the future, that does not mean that there is not available information to help us evaluate the speculative risk. In the case of investing in an extension, you might consider questions like these.

• Who runs the extension, and how stable are they?
• What end use is already active?
• If a repurposed country code, are there any political storm clouds on the horizon?
• What are the main competitors for this domain investment?
• Based on early sales, what is the approximate sell-through rate and typical sales prices?
• Is familiarity with the extension growing significantly?
• In what sectors and regions does the extension find use?
• Is there a trend of startups using this extension or type of name?

Do your research before you make a decision to invest.

In researching articles such as 12 Months of XYZ: A Look At The Data I did research (although not always explicitly include in the article), for .xyz, many of the questions on this list. The registry history, end-use, sell-through rates, average prices, sectors and regions, and startup trends with respect to the extension.

I think, there is a natural bias against anything except what long term investors have mainly already invested in, that is .com. Some investors have hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in .com. If the overall domain market does not grow, success in anything else takes a little bit of market share from .com. Any who have invested heavily in .xyz will probably carry a different inherent bias. Anyone can make good objective points, or not.

I think that a good discussion can help to illuminate concerns in any sector or TLD. But it is also important for each of us to realize that we carry biases and self-interest into any discussion. I am particularly cognizant of that as someone who has the privilege to write for the community. Personally, what small investments I make are not that concentrated in any one TLD or niche. I like being diversified in many things, partly as a learning exercise.

I sometimes leap into a new opportunity and register a lot of names but the total amount I invest I am prepared to lose, and also my total is less than I currently have tied up in just a handful of my current .com names. For example I hand registered a lot of .quest in the early days of general availability, cause I liked the names available and matches across dot. So far only 2 sales ever in that TLD, so I know it is high risk, but if you spend a limited amount, I am fine with that. In fact my one sale covers everything I invested in the TLD and more, but another 6 months will have to decide on renewals.

At the end of the train/wreck article I shared my personal set of questions. Here it is.

I require a yes to all items to go ahead and board the speculative train.

1. Am I sitting on any money that is available for domain investing right now? I personally try to only invest what I have made from domain names. I pass up some promotions or opportunities if they happen when I have no extra funds. Don’t speculate with money you will need for other purposes.
2. Have I researched this opportunity? Have I really put the hours into looking at the relevant statistics and type of names that have sold so far?
3. Have I also put the effort into finding the best possible names?
4. Am I the right person to invest in this? This is related to the point above that not every train is right for every person. Can you justify to your accountability partner why you are investing in this sector or extension?
5. Is now the right time? The timing might be related to cost-of-ownership opportunities, like promotions, but also is there still a good pool of quality names available, or have I missed this train?
6. If I reasonably estimate costs, likely return and probability of sale does it make quantitative sense? This is the hardest to estimate, but important. Promotions may tip the argument making a one year trial on some domain names worthwhile. For example if I estimate the annual selling probability at 1% for a particular domain name, and the likely net return after costs at $1500, then paying $15 for one year is the breakeven point. If one year of registration has dropped from $40 to $5, the odds now favour making a speculative investment, whereas they did not previously.

So If I answer yes to all six points, I next set a maximum total amount that I feel comfortably investing, and stick to it.

I am currently expanding somewhat my personal .xyz as I can find names I like. That said, I wonder if it is too late, as so many names I would want are in domainer hands and they are not letting them go cheap. I am mixing aftermarket wholesale purchases and hand registration. In hand registration I am opting for the 2-year promotion, which gives me a bit of breathing room and I can hold the name for 2 years for essentially the cost of 1 year of .com. I am hoping within 2 year the type of .xyz that sells will broaden, but it might not.

Anyway, hope some of this has been of value. And balanced.

Happy investing, whatever you choose to concentrate on.

Bob

 

[Jimmysun]

The truth is .com maxi mostly only attack .xyz but not .io(usually stands for tech company) or .co (users would accidentally type m after) etc. because in deep heart they knew .xyz is the only threat has chance to overturn .com status symbol.

 

[jhm]

just from reading the title of this thread, I just know the "XYZ" army will have a lot to say about this

Time for popcorn

 

[Xiberia]

Which brings me to my next point. Because domainers are rushing to register every single available .xyz domain that is decent, it leaves little space for businesses to set up under the extension and promote the extension. This exposure is crucial in order for the TLD to grow. It's getting to the point where you can't find a decent two word .xyz and that's not because they are taken by businesses. Which will certainly stunt its growth.

Hang on, your first criticism is that they don't sell for much (so they're affordable to small businesses) and this criticism is that somehow businesses are prevented from registering names.

It's like saying .COM will "fail" because 160 million (40x as many as XYZ) have been taken.

Aesthetically and phonetically .xyz is ugly. It's three syllables, unlike .com, .me, .net, .co... Which makes it harder to say. It looks horrible when it's part of a design or even just typing it. It feels cheap.

I used to hate XYZ, before all the hype (with this and Google), and considered it just another trash extension, a stupid and meaningless combo of letters, which it was, only used by spammers and scammers because it was dirt cheap (which is why it's now blocked and filtered by so much of the internet).

However I now, with hundreds of atrocious extensions, don't believe that it looks bad, in fact it looks better than most.

And although the pivot towards "yeah it totally, like, means 3D and Metaverse" is sad and desperate, especially after all the other stuff people have tried to claim it means (including nothing/everything), I think it's a gimmick that might actually catch on.

There's no other reason to have an XYZ, as with IO, where the relation to tech (input/output) is even more banal and tenuous, but which still caught on with Silicon Valley idiots.

The letters XYZ are genuinely known to tech people working in 3D and people with money do like to pay for concepts, however weak they are. And at a certain point it doesn't matter why people are using XYZ any more, just that enough high profile and/or 'cool' sites are.

Are there, even now, more major companies, in major/emerging marketplaces, using .NET, .ME or .CO than using .XYZ?

IMO .NET died a long time ago, .ME is something for personal pages, other than one domain only (despicable.me, and I may have just imagined that one), and the single selling point of .CO (other than being cheap, like XYZ), being a typo of .COM, has long been a point against it.

So, can XYZ fail at what? It's just a domain extension.

Obviously it won't overtake .COM, despite what the looniest cultists here pretend to think, because nothing will overtake .COM. It has about 150 million more registrations than whatever extension is next, which sure as hell isn't XYZ.

It doesn't have to do that though. What it can realistically do is become the extension of choice for a certain market, or range of markets, metaverse/crypto/NFT/whatever.

That is a possibility, and there's no point in denying it when already major sales from major players in certain areas are occurring.

 

[redemo]

Before I can answer your question I need to know what do you mean with "top extension".

Come on guys at least all this .top carry-on is entertaining. Why the hate? He really is a funny guy!

 

[Jimmysun]

My teacher told me once there are some people started to hate you means you’re about to succeed.

 

[johnn]

This thread will lead to nowhere as there will always be two sides of the story.
If you don't like or believe in the extension then don't buy it. It's simple like that why make it a big story.
People on the left will prove people on the right are wrong.
It can all be stop here so your friends can do some buying/selling to make money rather than engage in this thread.
You are not helping anyone - You are hurting them.

 

[william]

Did anyone call this thread? I hope you didnt get some kind of weird dream about .xyz and started this thread.
I can understand your concern about .XYZ. But, I can assure you to buy some good .xyz keywords and hold on to them. You wont regret.
You wouldn't get any advantage on those cctld's like .us or .me if you spread negativity on .xyz.

This is a domain discussion forum, where we discuss domains. I understand you may be sensitive to people discussing .xyz as you are heavily invested in it, but that doesn't mean others shouldn't discuss it or say anything negative about it. This is where domainers hang out, not end users.

Also, so far, you have provided 0 reasons why .xyz is actually a good extension.

 

[william]

I saw some people making comparisons of .xyz to .com. If we compared sales of .com to .xyz:

137 mil .com names registered
3.5 mil .xyz names registered

Since .xyz has only 2.6% of the amount of .com names we can use that to find approximately how many sales we should see of .xyz vs .com.

According to Namebio, there were 240,431.com reported sales in the past two years. 2.6% of that should be 6142. In reality, the number of reported sales of .xyz for the last two years on Namebio is 867. That's 86% less.

 

[johnn]

I think no one know for sure what's going on.
A lot of members here are selling .xyz name so don't hurt your friend.
Just let it go the way it suppose to go.
If you like it - buy it. If you don't like it - buy something else.
Be nice and your wife will not give you a hard time.

 

[albatrosl]

The last year increase in sells, and even fact this post is polemic & trending, just mean one thing, xyz is more valuable now than a year ago, and the trend continues. And facts do not care about opinions.

 

[jmcc]

Concentrating on domain name sales misses the bigger picture. The number of domain names registered in a TLD is no longer a reliable metric. There are three things that happen when a gTLD fails. The first is that new registration volume collapses. That's easy to measure from the monthly registry reports that are published by ICANN. The second is that renewals drop because people no longer think it is worth paying the renewal fee. This is also easy to measure from the registry reports. The third is that the development of new websites collapses and websites on the gTLD stop being updated. That is a lot more difficult to measure.

ICANN even has a procedure for handling failed gTLDs (Emergency Back End Operator/EBERO). The theory was that a failed gTLD would be put into EBERO so that a successor registry could be found and the gTLD sold. So far, only .WED has been moved to EBERO. Other new gTLDs that failed to meet expectations were bought by larger players. Some of Frank Schilling's Uniregistry gTLDs were bought by XYZ at auction and their transfer to XYZ has just been approved by ICANN.

The problem with the OP/initial post is that there is no definition of what constitutes a failed gTLD. At the moment, the .XYZ is very far from being a failed gTLD and it has been one of the more successful new gTLDs. It is not .COM or a ccTLD but there is web usage in the gTLD.

Regards...jmcc

 

[Finest]

Some people don't care much if it crashes and burns tomorrow because they have already made their money. Others, like myself, are regretting the missed opportunity.

 

[DNGear]

This is obviously a troll thread but I like it, it’s just that people tend to say something that opposes to their subconsciousness, as more people hated .xyz means more people love it and more people bashed it means more people are afraid of it, so the real situation is when a .xyz dictionary word drops domainers will desperately going to catch.

Just because something opposes your view, doesn't mean it's trolling. Like I said, it's my opinion. You may have another. Especially given the fact that you own a good lot of one word .xyz domains and have made some significant sales. However, this applies to people who are trying to get in on the "gold rush" of "xyz". Though you haven't really made any points on why ".xyz" will succeed as an extension.

Did anyone call this thread? I hope you didnt get some kind of weird dream about .xyz and started this thread.
I can understand your concern about .XYZ. But, I can assure you to buy some good .xyz keywords and hold on to them. You wont regret.
You wouldn't get any advantage on those cctld's like .us or .me if you spread negativity on .xyz.

 

[Bob Hawkes]

As to Spamhaus data size, I would add the following. Their core function is to protect mailboxes from spam and some other forms of abuse. They protect about 3 billion mailboxes (as part of their service), so all mail that goes to or from these mailboxes form the dataset.

When they compute spam percentages and scores, they consider only the domain names used to send or receive mail (or mainly that, also bot nets). In any extension, even .com, the majority of domain names don't send or receive mail, at least not in a way using Spamhaus services. So the number of domain names they look at is much lower than the total number registered, but it is the active domain names.

Just as an example, there are about 3.24 million domain name registrations in .biz, but only just over 33,000 of those .biz names were seen as active in the mail seen by Spamhaus, of which 7510 were characterized as having spam-like behaviour in the most recent posted data (one can dispute whether their standards are too strict, another question). So for the .biz extension the current percentage is 22.7% bad.

As it is a constant struggle of registrars and registries to shut down bad actors, the actual numbers go up and down with time.

So the 3 billion email accounts that are represented. How does that compare to the total number of email accounts in the world. Estimates vary from 3.9 billion to 7.0 billion for the total number of email accounts, but I suspect the upper is more correct. So in other words, Spamhaus probably monitor nearly half the active email accounts in the world.

It is a significant data source for widely used TLDs in my account, but when one gets to new and seldom used TLDs the sample may be in the hundreds or few thousand, and is not nearly enough. I would think the major 3 legacy, and the most popular country code and new extensions, it is a sufficient size. But that is just my opinion.

Spamhaus has a significant staff, have been doing this for 20 years. I respect their data, but yes, sample size needs to be taken into account.

Bob

PS Not a statistics expert, but if results are roughly part of a normal distribution a simple measure is to take double the square root of the number to set an uncertainty that should hold 95% of the time. For example, if some sample is 100, the real number is probably between 100-(2*10) to 100+(2*10), 80 to 120. But if it was just 16, would be 8 to 24, rather uncertain. Of course if systematic bias, this does not hold. Like if I only sampled domain sales from the seller who sells at the highest values, I can't conclude anything.