New TLDs WILL (I think) Cause Internet Land Rush

[np12]

Everyone knows that this is the first and maybe the last chance, they have,to becom the owner of the great new tld.
So i predict that we are going to see.A landrush unlike anything seen befor.With fierce battles between different Project stakeholders.
Some companies will buy many new TLDs. Better to own to many than to few.
Smart people will investigate the new TLDs potential for earnings and judge if it exceeds the various ICANN fees and Other expenses.
My guess is that most okay-keyword-TLDs will be profitable
and therefor i think we are going to see 1000's if not 10000's
of new TLDs.

.stock .oracle .print .company .Airport .BLOG .town .hockey
.Tobacco .tools .business .brokers .hire .logo .peace .date .pool .Bowling .Dolls .dream .game .Boxing .nutrition .bob

 

[akcampbell]

I can't see it myself, RegistryPro have lost a small fortune running .pro in the last 5 years with modest competition and until recently a bouyant domain market. 90% of domain registrants prefer .com and 90% of the 10% of people who invest in alternative extensions lose money so I don't know where you think this gold rush is going to come from.

Of the 24 gTLD ideas you came up with, I own a third of those keywords in .pro; Company.pro, Airport.pro, Tool.pro, Hire.pro, Date.pro, Pool.pro and Dream.pro and I haven't received an offer for any of them.

When these 10,000 new extensions come along, they are all going to rank lower in Google for relevance than .pro because they will be newer and page rank is partly determined by continuous years of registration.

Event.com sold for $165,000 in August 07. I won Event.pro at a Snapnames today for $675. I don't usually pay as much as 0.4% of a .com for a .pro but I thought it was a nice fit with the extension. There are 35 URL's in the top 30 pages of Google with the text strings Event and Pro in but only 3 people in the auction for Event.pro, including myself.

There are 35,000 .pros registered and the registry still can't cover it's costs. How many keywords in .nutrition, .logo, .airport, .bowling, .peace and .boxing will be worth registering, 10? 100? Other gTLD's like .company and .business would never see the light of day because they are too close to existing extensions, in this case .com and .biz.

I hold some excellent .info domains, including Rates.info, Prices.info, Coupons.info, and Savings.info. .info is widely regarded as the most successful alternative extension to date. Coupons.com sold for $2.2m, Savings.com sold for $1.9m, and Rates.info and Prices.info fit the extension like a glove, both being information concept keywords. I have received 38 offers on Sedo in the last two years for these .infos but not one of those offers has been for more than I paid.

The tone of your post is like somebody skipping off to war thinking it's going to be one big adventure. The reality of alternative extension domaining is a million miles from your gold rush fantasy of 10,000 new profitable extensions. The only difference between the recent wave of alternative extension landrushes and the next one is that previously 90% of people lost money, next time it will be 99%.

The registry maths are pretty simple, RegistryPro employ around 15 people. They keep about half of reg fees charged so 35,000 x $10 = $350,000 in fees. How much do you think it costs to pay 15 people, several of whom will be senior and earn $XXX,XXX+, ICANN fees, run an office, a registry, and market it? Unless you sell 100,000-200,000 domains, you lose money. 9 out of 10 of every new gTLD registries will end up losing money.

 

[Kate]

If you don't look at past history, you're bound to repeat the same mistakes.

 

[shane mac]

New Tld's will only serve to make the .com more valuable.When you have so many new and confusing Tld's all over the shop,the trend will be to follow the leader,search for the .com.ICANN can rush out as many of these new extensions all they want,sooner or later domainers and business's will realise that they are a waste of money and I will be sitting there laughing as they all fail to take off and turn a profit.

 

[equity78]

Excellent post Campbell, rep added.

 

[cityforums.com]

.anything will likely be a little more successful than new.net

.com will shine through all the confusion.

 

[np12]

All of you are right.It would be bad business to make your earnings depend on domainers.

But there's another way to earn lots of money on the tld.

Take for example .Bowling I would Owne run and profit from. Bowling.Bowling Balls.Bowling Bags.Bowling Shoes.Bowling Pin.Bowling and all the other good keywords. Of course one
would be forced to pay for Web Site Development and seo. I would guess that it could be highly profitable to take a big piece of the Bowling market.

Perhaps one day when the internet users have learned to associate the .bowling with bowling and
quality/trustworthiness. Perhaps then some may buy a .bowling domain at a high but acceptable price
example: AMF.bowling Brunswick.bowling AMFWorldCup.bowling

 

[DnEbook]

at this point aren't we talking big bucks for these new gtld's .... cant see a landrush because of costs

 

[akcampbell]

Take for example .Bowling I would Owne run and profit from. Bowling.Bowling Balls.Bowling Bags.Bowling Shoes.Bowling Pin.Bowling and all the other good keywords. Of course one would be forced to pay for Web Site Development and seo. I would guess that it could be highly profitable to take a big piece of the Bowling market.

I disagree. There are about 10 spaces on the first page of Google to make any real money out of. Every year thousands more sites compete for those spots, every year the sites already there get more backlinks, more content, more aged, and harder to dislodge.

A couple of months ago RegistryPro held a Best of .pro contest. I voted for BanquetTables.pro, do you know why? Because it was on the third page of Google and that was about 10 pages higher than it's nearest rival and this was supposed to be the Best of a whole alternative extension contest.

Are you aware that only 20% of internet users click through to the second page of search results on Google? In my development, I have got to the first page of Google once, with a 1998 regged .com exact match of the search term, and even then only temporarily, I fell back to page 2 after a couple of weeks. There was a noticeable shift in PPC between first and second page, virtually nothing on Page 2, maybe a buck or two a day on Page 1.

A site like Pin.Bowling would rank absolutely nowhere, any prospective registry owner would be better off regging TenPinBowling.pro, it's still available, and develop that for nothing. They would have a more keyword dense domain, people search for "Ten Pin Bowling", they don't search for "Pin" and it would be be an older reg and therefore rank higher with the same content, SEO and backlinks as any new extension ICANN is planning. Better still, they should go and pick up the .net or .org cheap because that will probably be regged years ago and give them the same ageing advantage of .com without paying .com prices.

New extensions are fool's gold. If RegistryPro and .pro domainers aren't making any money and .pro sounds impressive, works with virtually any keyword, has been available since 2005, and 15,000 US trademarks have the word Pro in, .bowling and the 100 keywords that work with it are in for a bumpy ride.

I'm not convinced new extensions will increase the value of .com. I started off as a .com investor, moved into .info, then onto .pro. Had I stayed in .com, that would have been more money pushing up .com values. New extensions slightly reduce the value of average to good .coms, we haven't seen that in the last 5 years because the slight downward pressure new extensions exert has been more than wiped out by more people getting into domaining. The market for single word generic .coms is less effected by alternatives because a business making a bid for Mortgage.com might switch their attention to Mortgages.com or Mortgage.co.uk but they are not going to apply for Mortgage.money in a landrush. There is no market overlap.

 

[call2shain]

Great Posting thanks~