Eric Lyon
Scorpion Agency LLCTop Member
- Impact
- 35,552
Today, I'll be analyzing the .place gTLD to see if I can dig up any helpful data points that could be stacked with someone elses research in to the .place domain extension.
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Note: At the time of this analysis there was a 1-character minimum to register a .place domain. There were also several 1-character .place domains available, but with a low-4-figure registration cost.
With the above in mind, lets dive right in...
.place domain registration costs
According to Tldes.com the .place domain registration cost ranges from $11.44 to $21.91+..place domains registered today
According to DNS.Coffee there are 10,513 .place domains registered today..place TLD and the latest 2026 phishing and malware report
According to cybercrimeinfocenter.org the .place TLD is not in the top-20 2026 phishing and malware list.Keyword "Place" registered in other TLDs in the last 24-hours
According to DotWeekly.com the keyword "Place" has been registered in 3 other TLDs 51 times in the last 24-hours.Public .place domain sales reports
There's a few public /place domain sales reports to look at to give an idea.Note: NameBio.com shows 27 .place domain sales reports ranging from $101 to $10,000.
Some notables sales were:
- our.place for $10,000
- mail.place for $1,590
- happy.place for $1,300
- vibe.place for $499
- bit.place for $235
- insurance.place for $101
5-year .place domain growth summary
The .place gTLD experienced an overall net growth of 39.76% over the last five years, increasing from 7,522 registrations in October 2021 to 10,513 registrations in October 2026. The trajectory shows steady early adoption, a minor mid-period correction, and a strong subsequent recovery to peak registration levels.
Annual Registration Breakdown & Growth Velocity
- October 2021: 7,522 domains (Baseline year)
- October 2022: 8,621 domains (+14.61% YoY growth) - Strong initial upward momentum as the extension gained broader visibility among creators and local businesses.
- October 2023: 10,177 domains (+18.05% YoY growth) - The highest single-year growth velocity in this data set, pushing the extension past the 10,000 registration milestone for the first time.
- October 2024: 9,541 domains (-6.25% YoY decline) - A notable market correction phase. This reduction typically represents the expiration of unrenewed speculative domains or promotional first-year registrations that were not maintained.
- October 2025: 9,903 domains (+3.79% YoY growth) - A return to positive expansion, demonstrating stable baseline demand and sustainable renewal interest.
- October 2026: 10,513 domains (+6.16% YoY growth) - The current all-time registration peak according to DNS.Coffee tracking data, solidifying a full recovery from the 2024 contraction.
8 niches for .place domains
1. Local Business & Physical Venues- Target Sites: Neighborhood bars, event spaces, boutiques, and cafes.
- Strategic Advantage: It acts as a clear digital storefront marker for storefronts whose primary brand identifier is their actual, physical brick-and-mortar location.
- Target Sites: Property management portals, co-working networks, apartment rental finders, and real estate agencies.
- Strategic Advantage: It provides a highly brandable alternative to .com by framing the business around finding a living space or working environment (e.g., yourname.place).
- Target Sites: City travel guides, food blogs, mapping projects, and local "top ten" recommendation lists.
- Strategic Advantage: It functions perfectly as an intuitive, easy-to-remember domain hack for aggregate discovery websites (e.g., besttacos.place).
- Target Sites: Concert halls, convention centers, wedding venues, and corporate event management companies.
- Strategic Advantage: It directly signals to users that the website is dedicated to booking a physical site for a specific gathering, gathering, or celebration.
- Target Sites: Maker spaces, community gardens, hacker spaces, and neighborhood forums.
- Strategic Advantage: It emphasizes inclusion, serving as a symbolic digital meeting ground for geographically tied social clubs and shared resources.
- Target Sites: Architecture firms, interior design studios, staging companies, and furniture brands.
- Strategic Advantage: It fits neatly into "beautify your space" marketing angles, positioning a brand around the artistic curation of an individual's personal environment.
- Target Sites: Independent artist galleries, photography portfolios, and design collectives.
- Strategic Advantage: It gives independent creators an abstract, professional destination name to present their collective bodies of work as a standalone "exhibition room."
- Target Sites: Fan forums, gaming communities, digital archives, and hobbyist blogs.
- Strategic Advantage: It creates a cozy digital destination vibe for online micro-communities to gather, trade information, and discuss specific subcultures.
What a playful .place domain hack might look like
A domain hack occurs when the word before the dot and the extension after the dot (place) combine to form a single, seamless phrase, word, or common expression. Because "place" is a highly versatile noun and verb in the English language, it offers several clever structural possibilities for domain hacking.The "Adjective + Place" Descriptive Hack
This is the most common approach, where the word before the dot describes the type of environment, feeling, or setting you are creating. It reads as a complete, multi-word phrase when read from left to right.
- happy.place (Reads as "Happy Place" - a universal idiom for a comfort zone or favorite destination)
- our.place (Reads as "Our Place" - perfect for a family blog, restaurant, or shared community hub)
- market.place (Reads as "Marketplace" - inherently builds a generic, powerful word for e-commerce)
- any.place (Reads as "Anyplace" - excellent for travel apps, navigation tools, or logistics companies)
Because "place" is also an active verb meaning to put, position, or locate something, the word before the dot can serve as the object of that action. This creates a compelling call-to-action (CTA) domain.
- take.place (Reads as "Take Place" - ideal for event planning calendars, ticketing platforms, or scheduling software)
- find.place (Reads as "Find Place" - an intuitive command string for real estate apps or apartment hunting portals)
- save.place (Reads as "Save Place" - a functional hack for bookmarking tools, mapping apps, or travel itineraries)
- order.place (Reads as "Order Place" - an actionable domain for food delivery setups or retail procurement)
You can play on alliteration, rhyming, or phonetic flow to make the domain highly memorable, even if it does not form a strict dictionary word.
- space.place (Rhyming hack - great for science blogs, co-working studios, or interior design concepts)
- pace.place (Rhyming hack - fits athletic training programs or productivity tracking software)
- show.place (Reads as "Showplace" - a legitimate dictionary word used for high-end real estate or galleries)
Many common compound words end with the word "place." By splitting the word exactly at the dot, you can register a high-value, single-word brand identity without paying legacy .com aftermarket prices.
- birth.place (Birthplace - great for genealogy tracking, local history archives, or heritage tourism)
- work.place (Workplace - perfect for HR platforms, enterprise SaaS tools, or office management solutions)
- fire.place (Fireplace - ideal for home improvement stores, cozy cabins, or lifestyle branding)
- hide.place (Hideplace / Hideaway variation - fun for private forums, security apps, or boutique lodging)
10 lead sources for a .place domain outbound campaign
- Google Maps & Google Business Profiles: Search for physical brick-and-mortar storefronts, boutique hotels, neighborhood cafes, and event spaces. Look for businesses that do not have a website listed or are using a clunky, third-party URL (e.g., ://myportfolio.com).
- Co-working & Shared Space Directories: Platforms like Coworker feature thousands of shared offices, maker spaces, and incubator hubs worldwide. These communities are prime targets for short branding hooks like cityname.place or brand.place.
- Wedding & Event Venue Aggregators: Browse directories like The Knot or WeddingWire for event spaces, banquet halls, and reception properties. Many local venues use long, hyphenated domains that can be upgraded to an elegant .place address.
- E-commerce Marketplaces: Target independent multi-vendor marketplaces, local artisan collectives, or niche forums on platforms like Shopify or Etsy. Any collective trying to market a curated digital "marketplace" is an organic fit for a keyword.place hack.
- Real Estate Brokerage Portals & PropTech Directories: Look up boutique agencies, independent real estate agents, and local property management firms on platforms like Zillow or local MLS directories. Agents often look for unique, property-specific single-landing pages or memorable branding strings.
- Product Hunt & BetaList: Track early-stage startups building co-working software, event management tools, corporate HR systems ("the workplace"), or location tracking applications. These newer SaaS startups are highly receptive to modern gTLDs.
- Interior Design & Architecture Directories: Platforms like Houzz host thousands of local staging companies, home decor brands, and architects. They are excellent targets for marketing the visual "beautify your space" angle.
- Social Media Location Tags (Instagram & TikTok): Scan location tags for trendy, visually driven physical spots (e.g., popup museums, secret bars, selfie studios). These modern, viral popups lean heavily into millennial/Gen-Z branding and appreciate unconventional domain names.
- Expiring or Parked Domain Lists: Use tools like Expireddomains.net to track generic .com domains containing the word "place" that are dropping or parked. If someone let thebesttacosplace.com expire, they are highly qualified prospects for tacos.place.
- Crowdfunding Platforms (Kickstarter & Indiegogo): Search the "Community," "Design," and "Food/Spaces" categories for projects seeking funding for physical hubs, community gardens, or art galleries. They often start with temporary social handles and need a permanent website identity launch.
- How to leverage an Ai Assistant to find domain leads
- How to leverage Social media to find domain leads
- How to leverage Job Boards to find domain leads
- eMail Marketing Best Practices for Domain Outreach
- List of FREE tools for outbound domain sales
- Outbound Domain sales Tips
Legal considerations when selling a domain to an existing business
When approaching an existing business to sell a domain name that matches or closely resembles their registered trademark, you enter a highly regulated legal landscape. If not handled with extreme caution, an outbound sales pitch can easily be classified as trademark infringement, bad faith registration, or cybersquatting. The core legal frameworks governing this are the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP) managed by ICANN globally, and the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA) under federal law in the United States.The Risk of "Bad Faith" and UDRP Forfeiture
Under ICANN’s UDRP rules, a trademark owner can forcibly strip a domain from your possession without paying you a dime if they can prove three specific elements:
- The domain name is identical or confusingly similar to a trademark in which they have rights.
- You have no rights or legitimate interests in respect of the domain name (e.g., you are not commonly known by that name, and you don’t run a legitimate business on it).
- The domain name has been registered and is being used in bad faith.
Financial Liability Under the ACPA
While a UDRP case can only cost you the domain name itself, a lawsuit filed under the United States ACPA carries severe financial penalties.
- If a court finds you registered a domain with a "bad faith intent to profit" from a protected trademark, you can be held civilly liable.
- The court can order the forfeiture or transfer of the domain name and award statutory damages ranging from $1,000 to $100,000 per domain name.
- The "Grosso Modo" Rule: Merely registering a generic word that happens to be trademarked by someone else is not inherently illegal. For example, if you register a generic word like vibe.place or mail.place because you intended to build a project, and a company named "Vibe" later wants it, that is generally permissible.
- Reverse Domain Name Hijacking (RDNH): If a big corporation tries to bully you out of a genuinely generic domain name that you registered in good faith without targeting them, a UDRP panel can penalize the company for abusing the system. However, the moment you target them via outbound outreach, the balance of proof shifts aggressively against you.
If your outbound pitch sounds like a threat, it can cross the line from a business negotiation into civil extortion.
- Never say: "If you don't buy this domain, I am going to sell it to your direct competitor," or "I will launch a critique site about your brand on this domain if you don't respond."
- Statements like these instantly establish a malicious, bad-faith intent to disrupt the business of a competitor, which is a textbook UDRP violation.
If you hold a generic keyword domain and genuinely believe a trademarked company could benefit from it, you must handle the approach with absolute neutrality:
- Price Neutrality: Never initiate the conversation with an aggressively high, arbitrary premium price. Instead, let them know the domain is available for acquisition on the secondary market and invite them to make an offer, or direct them to a neutral marketplace escrow landing page (like Sedo or Afternic).
- Establish Generic Value: Frame the value of the domain around its generic, industry-wide appeal rather than its connection to their specific trademarked brand. Pitch it as a generic industry category asset, not an extension of their identity.
- Perform Due Diligence First: Before reaching out, search trademark databases (like the USPTO). If an entity holds a highly unique, non-generic, invented-word trademark (e.g., "Exxon", "Verizon"), do not reach out to them at all. The odds of losing a UDRP on an invented word approach 100%. Stick exclusively to highly generic dictionary phrases where rights are naturally shared among many industries.
Potential .place domain investing strategy
Based on our compiled data, historical sales benchmarks, and registry trends, a highly strategic approach is required to invest successfully in the .place gTLD. The extension has evolved past its early speculative phase into a mature, stable niche asset, growing 39.76% over the last five years to reach 10,513 active registrations. Because raw domain volume is relatively low compared to massive legacy extensions, success relies on surgical acquisition rather than bulk registration.The Optimized .place Investment Strategy
An optimal portfolio strategy targets high-probability flips while minimizing ongoing renewal costs and legal liabilities.
Focus Exclusively on "Adjective + Place" and Pure Niche Authority
Avoid long or hyper-specific regional phrases that have low aftermarket demand. Instead, target universal, highly commercial combinations that sound natural to the ear.
- The Blueprint: Look for premium concepts similar to the known NameBio benchmarks we logged (e.g., happy.place at $1,300 or vibe.place at $499).
- Target Verticals: Target industries that naturally rely on physical or digital spaces, such as Real Estate/PropTech (find.place), Event/Wedding planning (gather.place), or E-commerce marketplaces (shop.place).
With a standard retail floor of roughly $11.44 per year, domain renewals can quickly erode profit margins if names sit in a portfolio for multiple years.
- Action Plan: Consolidate acquisitions through ultra-low-cost registrars like Spaceship ($11.44) or Wix ($11.45) rather than premium-priced platforms.
- Portfolio Cap: Limit speculative inventory to a lean, high-quality list. A portfolio of 50 highly curated domains costs roughly $570 annually to maintain, requiring only one mid-tier sale every two years to remain highly profitable.
The data shows that active outbound pitching is required to move new gTLDs, as organic inbound inquiries are rare for younger extensions.
- Lead Generation Strategy: Mine hyper-targeted business categories from Google Maps, The Knot, and co-working directories to find businesses operating on clunky, unbrandable .com URLs.
- Risk Mitigation: Only target businesses where the word "place" is a purely generic dictionary term (like a staging company or an art collective). Never approach a company with a distinctive, non-generic trademark to avoid severe UDRP or ACPA bad-faith penalties. Frame your outreach neutrally around industry categorization, directing leads to a secure escrow platform.
While legacy domains like Place.com command historic millions, .place gTLD values peak much lower. The data demonstrates a clear ceiling, with top-tier generic words like our.place capping out at $10,000.
- Pricing Sweet Spot: Aim for fast-turning liquid pricing between $499 and $2,500. This range is easily approved as a minor marketing expense by small-to-medium business owners (SMBs) and startups, maximizing your turnover velocity.
- How to leverage an Ai Assistant to find domain leads
- How to leverage Social media to find domain leads
- How to leverage Job Boards to find domain leads
- eMail Marketing Best Practices for Domain Outreach
- List of FREE tools for outbound domain sales
- Outbound Domain sales Tips
Questions for you
- Do you own any .place domains?
- If so, how are they doing for you?
- Thinking about investing into .place domains?
- If so, what niche will you target and why?
What works for one may not work for another and vice versa.
