Great interview. I didn’t know
@tekz999 was a Hongkonger (for some reason I always thought he was a Mainland China based domainer).
Some follow up questions for Gil after reading the interview:
1. In the interview you mentioned that your biggest sale was a 4L.com domain for $2980. You also mentioned that you bought multiple 3L.com from a Japanese seller. Did you sell your 3L.com names for less than $2980?
2. You mentioned that you love .biz, .info, and .mobi - How do you feel the ngtlds have affected these extensions?
3. .COM.HK vs .HK?
I have other sales with signed NDA agreements, and I cannot disclose. However, that 4l.com sale was a legend. The marginal profit was 428 times the money spent for registering it at that time for $6.95. I were in bliss. I am still very happy with this personal record.
Frankly speaking, ngtlds are not so global. I call them Non-Global TLDs instead of New Global TLDs. The Chinese government has very strict policy on tlds approval. Indeed, if you research more about domainings in China, you will know all domains that operates a website in China have to 备案 (Put on record, ICP registration). Even the newest gtld .xyz currently is not 备案 competent. It is in progress however. That's why after 2 years, we still do not see any .xyz websites that can be operational in China.
China has a very big domaining market. All global companies want to tab into the Chinese market. Therefore, their companies domain TLDs must be 备案 competent. That is the old gtlds, and not the new gtlds. As time goes, renewal fees will also be a major factor for today's global domaining community. People will choose and favor towards domains that has the least to lower renewal fees. The competition is already now on the registry level. The registries are competing with who has the cheapest lowest domain renewal fees due to currently over-populated varieties on too much gtlds to choose from. With the current domaining environment, less renewal fees tlds will be favored. Therefore, renewal fee will also be a major factor for consideration.
I envision there will be many domain drops on the 3rd to 4th quarter of 2016 for new gtlds domains. Then on the 1st to 2nd quarter of 2017, old gtlds will rise back when the market realizes the huge amount of drops on ngtlds and favored back again to the old ones. When this happens, a lot new gtlds will have a hard time operating for profit.
Yes, we will see a minor portion of websites to be used as examples with the uses of new gtlds. But do they represent and are they able to represent the prosperous future for that ngtld? I have doubts on that. I also envision there will be new single letters gtlds approved by ICANN to join the battle. We have 2 letters tlds, why we still do not have single letter ones then? Why not? That is my prediction for the future.
Hence, my vision is old gtlds will not be threatened by new gtlds. The grounds for com/net/org/biz/info/mobi will only be stronger. The old gtlds are operated with registries that have multiple years of experience. Yes, some new gtlds are operated on the same registries that provides the old gtlds. But again, will these new gtlds survive? The market will decide.
If you study are domain drops, you will see people register domains for 1 year, then drop them. Why? Because they thought it was fun to register them, and fun times don't last forever. They register them for hype, and only for partial event upholding purpose, for example. What does this tell you about new gtlds? Think about it and find the correlation.
Companies in Hong Kong are now more favorable with the .hk extension, but still less on the .com.hk extension. The shorter is still the better. Also, this is because .hk only means Hong Kong, and big companies do not only choose Hong Kong as a single client based market. Big companies choose worldwide market and that's why they still choose to favor old gtlds still to represent a global operating business model. This can be correlates with the current .us domain extension.
