discuss THE DOWNFALL OF DOMAINING?

[artstar]

Has the influx of 400+ tlds contributed to the downfall of domaining?

have you found the industry take a dramatic drop in profits and sales?

Imo this industry is about to get a major tune up and its not in a good way.

millions of domains will be worthless or already are

drops will exceed any dropped stats in the past

millions of $ will/has been lost by domainers to registrars.

 

[ProvenPro]

About four years ago, the top domain on the GoDaddy auction Most Active list would be around $300. Since then, the domain market has much more money flowing in and a lot of competition for just decent domain names that become available. The problem is a lot of domainers are impatient once a domain name is acquired. I have reached out to all possible end users with certain domains and received no response, only to have a new business come out of nowhere a few years later and purchase the name. I have had droughts and unbelievable streaks of good fortune with domain sales. Sure, there is some luck, but you need to put yourself in position to get lucky. Do your best to acquire desirable names without putting yourself in a bad spot financially and ignore the industry noise.

 

[Mr. Deleted]

I go back to the soccer jersey analogy - people are willing to pay more than $5 for a colorful, well-designed jersey made of quality fabric and which represents a favorite team. A retailer that tries to sell these for $XXXX will be sitting on a lot of inventory as most buyers are just not interested in paying that sort of money for a soccer jersey. While domain investors like to use the real estate analogy, most potential buyers / end users just do not value domains as something worth paying a lot of money for. Thus, they migrate toward reg fee options which may include extra words, hyphens, abbreviations and alternate extensions. So alternate extensions have a place because most domain buyers are not willing to pay much for domain names. That does not make investing in inferior extensions a good investment. Either way, even if you have a decent-quality jersey for sale for $100, if there are dozens of competing options available for $35, potential buyers will migrate toward the lower-priced inventory.

I do not know how many millions of aftermarket domains there are but based on the explosion of new TLD registrations and speculation in CHIPS and numerics, there are a lot more aftermarket domains now than a few years ago. Meanwhile the number of end users looking to buy an aftermarket domain probably has not changed much over that time. Supply and demand dictates there will be a lot of unsold inventory.

I heard a guy say there was not enough inventory. I am not sure I agree with that nessisarily, there are a lot of naming options, but for actual traffic and buyers, you do need a good name.

 

[artstar]

and if you don't own the dot com u r screwed!!

 

[netbull]

There is Downfall for .com Surely as now people have 400+ other options most of them are meaningless though. Whatever number of domains are registered in these 400+ Tlds everyday these were actually supposed to be .com if these were available, if not they would have been bought from domain market contributing to .com boom. But .COM is .COM people are used .COM. It will continue to rule the market forever even though with a far less price than before.

.com is till the king, In last one month out of Top 100 sales of more than $10,000

.com 70 (The Undisputed King)
.net 7
.org 1
.de 2
.us 5
.co 2
.co.uk 4
.tv 1
.nl 1
.pl 1
.pt 1
.at 1
.io 1
other tlds 3 (all 400+ tlds)

 

[eyedomainous]

Most serious domainers (not hand reg collectors) ...

While, overall, I agree with your post I stand in defense of 'hand reg collectors'.

"Serious domainers" have made domaining properties the web's No Go Zone, and in the process made 'domainers' a despised group, akin to pimps ruining a neighborhood by flooding it with whorehouses. This is the Downfall of Domaining.

Collectors, on the other hand, understand a property's provenance, and it being in the index, are essential to the value of virtually every property.

I used to run an art gallery, and while I could have made easy money by putting porn ad banners on nude paintings & sculptures, and other contextual ads on other works, most people would have looked at me with disgust... and the gallery would soon be considered a tacky No Go Zone.

While most collectibles are not high volume businesses, when sales do happen they are substantial because of the respect shown to the work, its history, the space, artist, etc..

Domain names could have been an extension of Word Art, domainers --artists (with portfolios), and the industry could have been valued for its creative output, but the self-anointed 'serious domainers' sold out to the cheapest ad Johns. But pimps make money... so they must be doing it right.

 

[TheWatcher]

The new extensions can be compared to the great old gold rush's. The real winners were the ones selling the equipment to the prospectors... there were a few who struck it rich, but the real money was made selling goods and services to those hopping at striking it rich!

Love this analogy.

 

[WatchDogue]

IMO , re the " millions of $ " lost to registrars , you are likely correct and a few thousand of those dollars lost to registrars were at one time my dollars.

I volunteered to buy the many names I've lost dollars on and presumably made the best purchase guestimate I could at the time to evaluate the mis-purchased names spanning many extensions.

New niche extensions with available keywords for specific niche marketplaces will over time, I believe, have a moderate value to end users in their respective niches, although on average will likely sell for a percentage of their parallel .com names.

There will likely be a buyer's market for some of the new niche specific extensions and again IMO new extension sellers may have to accept prices commensurate with new extensions less desirable than their .com parallels.