Snoop said:
I'm not sure we are agruing on the same point here, I am saying there is massive supply of these names. A buyout would be very difficult to hold over the long term.
According to DYYO.com there are about 63,000 LLLL.coms remaining, including those in short-term "tasting" (55,000 currently un-taken). This is out of about 457,000 total possible LLLL.com combinations. So there are far more in investor and end-user hands now than there are remaining.
Granted, most of those remaining are not very attractive, but I would not mind a gift of QZY.com and I imagine you would not either. As the available LLLL.com names diminish (and the trend is clear and regular, see dyyo.com/analysis_remaining.php ) the "bad" names will look better.
Market prices are determined by supply and demand, not simply supply.
Agreed. The supply of LLLL.coms, while large, is finite. And, as pointed out above, the available supply is diminishing at a rate where extinction, should the trend hold, will occur sometime around the fall of next year.
I believe the availability of LLLL.coms for reg fee causes the perception of their value to to be a lot less than it would be if they were unavailable to reg. Once they are not available for reg fee they will become a commodity for investors in the same way as LLL.com, LLL.net, LLL.org, LLL.info, LLL.us, three character .com and most recently LLL.mobi, (although the last market has not fully stabilized).
There is a great advantage to these names for the investor, particularly the newer investor, in that the value of these names can be, to a large degree, calculated (see 3character.com), as opposed to Keyword.coms where much experience is needed to estimate value. This will provide a level of security to newer investors and attract them to LLLL.coms.
Firstly this figure is incorrect, 6 years ago (Dec 2000) there was 20.6 million dot com's registered. So the numbers have gone up 150%.
http://www.zooknic.com/Domains/counts.html
That is near the peak of the dot com boom, I believe (?), so if we are up 150% since then, with only a few signs of overheating, I would think/hope we have quite a ways before the next crash.
Secondly growth rates tend to slow over time, alot the recent growth is due to traffic tasting, even another doubling in 6 years would be unlikely in my view unless reg fees fall or something like that.
The internet continues to grow rapidly, and the mobile internet is just beginning. Regardless, it would take only a 15% overall growth in the registration of .coms to erase the remaining LLLL's. At that point there will likely be a number of sellers trying to make a quick profit who will provide some names for a short time, and then the natural price point based on supply / demand will be approached. 1/26 the then current price of a similar LLL.com, IMHO.
Which is quite a lot, considering.