New 'Brand' TLDs and their impact on .INFO/BIZ/US?

[tomcarl]

Just reading on ICANN's new clever/greedy stunt for allowing people to register their own 'TLDs' (although at 185k I believe)

If these start popping out of the woodwork, .lawyer, .food, .store, etc...

I know these won't do much to the value of .com's, net's, org's, imo but...

What do you think their impact on the value of .BIZ, .INFO and .US will be?

Do you think it would hurt these already not too valuable extensions or will these continue to lead after the first 3 tlds?

 

[Domainate.com]

Just reading on ICANN's new clever/greedy stunt for allowing people to register their own 'TLDs' (although at 185k I believe)

If these start popping out of the woodwork, .lawyer, .food, .store, etc...

I know these won't do much to the value of .com's, net's, org's, imo but...

What do you think their impact on the value of .BIZ, .INFO and .US will be?

Do you think it would hurt these already not too valuable extensions or will these continue to lead after the first 3 tlds?

IMO, the further from the top of the food chain the extension is, the more likely it is to be hurt. I personally think com and org won't be affected and might even be helped by more extensions. Net might be affected a bit and .info, .biz and .us I bet will see a drop.

Consider this: .com and .org are commonly a first choice - .com for a commercial site and .org for a non-profit. When the first choice is gone, people go to the 2nd choice, then the 3rd, etc. OR will look up alternatives in the 1st choice. Actually there are 4 possibilities as I see it:

1. They like .com or .org enough that they stick with it regardless.

2. They like the GOOD SLD they're searching so much that they stick with it regardless of extension and wind up with a lower quality extension.

3. They like the BAD SLD they're searching so much that they stick with it regardless of extension, but the 2nd or 3rd choice is probably available if the first choice isn't.

4. They like domain hacks or out-of-the-ordinary kinds of names and opt for a corresponding SLD/TLD combo that fits.

#2 is where all the new extensions will hurt the established but fairly weak extensions, and #1 and #3 are the reasons why the further up the chain the extension is, the better its chances of holding ground are. Arguably a #1b could be that they like a certain subset of extensions (like com/net/org) and stick with only those, which a lot of domainers especially do.

 

[gpmgroup]

TLDs take years to become familiar

It has taken .org around 25 or so to reach 9.3 million registrations.
It has taken .info around 10 years or so to reach 8.0 million registrations.
It is around 7 years since .us second level was opened up and for .us to reach around 1.7 million registrations.

Mind & Machines & Peter Dengate Thrush whose business model is based on getting new gTLD registrations claim / spinning 25% growth in domain registrations (currently 200,000,000) as a result of new gTLDs. i.e. 50,000,000 new registations.

Even if the 50,000,000 is realistic at $20 retail that's a cool $1 billion for what is likely to be an additive cost with little tangible benefits for most owners.

Even if a best case scenario of 50,000,000 sounds a lot it's only 6x .info and when .info and .biz started out there wasn't a lot of competition. ICANN is planning 100's of new gTLDs, getting mindshare / user acceptance is going to be a massive problem for new gTLDs.

Many of the would be new gTLDs applicants think if they build it people will come, my guess is unless they can add real tangible value that isn't already available by the existing options investors are going to be very disappointed with the results.

Given all that, my guess is there will be little impact in .info .biz and .us - Less desirable, awkward or contrived meaning type names will remain difficult to sell and good names will still be desired.

 

[lincolndsp]

will add that cctlds will remain unaffected by this stld/gtld bloodbath
staying on topic i will say that overall .info/.biz/.us will be affected to some extent but not that strong because they have their own market and place in internet ecosystem.

 

[4pm]

i think that the major consequence of fast new tlds introduction will be devaluation of "keyword" based names in weak "pseudo-generic" cctlds like .cc, .co, .ws etc and not-so-premium second-tier gtlds like info/biz.
Lets face it - we are buying keywords in those tlds because they presumably would add value to niche sites giving them better search visibility and results position. But when you have 50 "appartments.tld"s instead of 5 the keyword doesnt help much in search optimization anymore and becomes much less memorable for users also.
All exact keyword names in generic tlds combined wont even fit 1st google page soon. And there is no reason anymore to chase keywords as desperately as it used to be. Keyword name in SEO will become less important, while pagerank, unique content, type-in traffic will increase their weight as main ranking factors.
Of course, when it comes to "default" gtlds like .com/net/org they will still be first choice for site owners to pick, for historical reasons and users awareness. But even they cant avoid value deterioraton - in any market higher supply leads to lower prices if demand does not rise at the same rate (which there is no reason for to be seen). Wont surely happen overnight, wont happen to super premium words and industry segments with high competition probably, but in average (especially in commodity 2-4 words "exact keyword" names business) that will happen and can be fast enough to leave all "1goodkeyword".xx and "keyword+keyword+keyword".com/net/org with half of demand (and price levels) they are seeing now.. non-commercial dictionary words will likely also suffer from this in full. plus net/org names where the term doesnt fit the extension perfectly would also become of less value as .web for instance could be better in many cases than net/org etc.

..only personal assumptions