news The End Of .COM

[DomainVP]

With the new Google acquisition of ABC.XYZ Lori Anne Wardi recently wrote an interesting article on "The Dawn of the Post Dot Com Era".

https://www.neustar.biz/blog/the-dawn-of-the-post-dot-com-era

It's notable to point out that Lori also was a representative of the .CO extension, when Twitter was using no_url_shorteners and Amazon bought A.co, Z.co, and K.co in 2011.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/17/amazon-buys-the-a-co-z-co-k-co-and-cloud-co-domains/

“We’re not looking for a major brand to switch over to .co, but every day new companies are starting and can’t get the domain name that they want,” says Wardi. “We want to be the domain of the next Twitter and the next Facebook.”

Big companies that bought new extensions; do you think the end result will be the same for .XYZ?

 

[Kate]

You typed too fast, your sentence is incomplete.

The End Of .COMmon sense.

Fixed for you.

 

[Fonzie]

There are millions going to into the promotion of new domain extension and products with costs of 100m+ are being promoted on new gTLDs. Some billion dollar companies are already on gTLDs. Do your research.

Too many here on NP are stuck in the past, believing gTLD will not affect their business. It has and it will. NET and ORG are already seeing less sales. At least the names you and me are trying to sell (I am not talking about gems like malls.com, teamwork.com, business.com, etc.) have lost in value. Names that used to be in the 20 to 30k range will be very difficult to move in 2017 and beyond and everyone who still owns such names then will notice changes in the way they can negotiate with other parties.

This has a great impact and we're already seeing corporations complain about gTLDs so much that they want to sue ICANN - so don't tell me the impact is low. On a scale of 0 to 10 I would rate it a BIG 8. It's huge and a huge opportunity for this industry.

Lots of vapid speculation and gross exaggeration there.
There may be 'millions going into promoting new TLD's', however if we added up all the entirety of all commercial dollars spent that involved advertising a .com domain name since the advent and rise of commercial internet, it's probably trillions (with a T and a S).

Companies that want to sue ICANN about new gTLDs has absoltuely nothing to do with the marketing importance of the new TLDs, everything to do with some of the TLDs being nothing more than an IP shakedown racket where brand owners feel compelled to register their www.brand.whatever (which was much more financially manageable in the old era but is much more difficult in the era of rapidly expanding private-interest TLD spaces that are predictibly involving the same morons we see registering www.AMicrosoftSite.info doing the same in whatever .trash they have a 'hunch' about, which gets costly to run down across a sea of new TLDs)

Its not a huge opportunity for anyone but the operators, and the most interesting part will be when some of them start going bust but their operations are worth less than the costs to ICANN and manage them. What then with the few bozos who registered domains in those ridiculous extensions? Does ICANN then take over 'orphan' TLDs? Expect to see that coming in years to come.

I do believe this is probably a long term paradigm shift, but outside the scope of my own lifetime (and yours too). Common to all naive believers of irrational 'radical change' is this unfounded notion that anyone who points out they're off-base is just 'stuck in the past'. It has nothing to do with being 'stuck in the past' as much as it does some people have enough insight to forecast the future better than you.

I've had this conversation time and time again in the domain space with .co, .tel, "3d Domainers", etc. None of them listen, "this time it's different", "you're just stuck in the past", etc, etc, etc, until they finally get pounded out by renewals (usually year 2 or 3) and they just quietly vanish from the domain space all together.

 

[biggie]

give it a .break

 

[Kate]

Exactly. New extensions are not a threat but a HUGE opportunity.

For the registries and the registrars.... Not for domainers. Few will make any significant money. I think the risk/reward ratio is truly disproportionate. Have you ever heard of domainers making a killing in alternate extensions in in the past ?

Some new extensions will do better than others but on the whole they are even less desirable than .biz today. Consumers have so much choice in new extensions that they don't need to buy any from domainers, with a few exceptions. New extensions are not fit for pure play domaining. Low demand, huge supply.

 

[gilescoley]

There is no camparison, .xyz is the new .co and thats it

Big G only settled for this name because.....

Disney wouldn't sell ABC.com
BMW wouldn't sell Alphabet.com

 

[bmugford]

.COM 1985 - 2015. RIP.

Killed by a .Horse

Brad

 

[Kate]

This is a discussion forum, opinions are all over the place, so you also have to counter silly arguments all the time.

First of all, the end-of-dotcom spin always comes from the same people:

• ignorant story writers
• registries or registrars who have a vested interested and want to sell you something
  
• domainers who invested in new extensions and are looking for validation of their opinions. If they must knock down .com to make a point - they are insecure... Bitterness at missing the boat. Maybe you have also noticed they are newbies most of time, and don't have a lot of sales and experience under their belt. I have bad news for them: If you failed at dotcom, new extensions will not be your savior.

Next point: the relative market share of .com vs ccTLDs has been in constant decline for over a decade. But .com has continued to grow at a brisk pace. It outperforms all new extensions combined. Says something isn't it. With +110 milion registrations the accumulated mass is so enormous that quite frankly a shift is not going to occur overnight.
This is reality. You don't make good investment decisions by discarding reality.

I don't agree that .com is overpriced and out of reach. Most sales are in the low $,$$$ range, good domain names are even being bought for less than that. They are affordable for businesses. It's generally businesses that buy domain names, private persons usually won't pay a lot. People who don't want to pay a premium have always had alternatives available to them. Nothing has changed here.

The only thing that matters is reality so look around you, pay attention to the changes but don't believe the hype.
If .com is dying, why do people continue to register .com domains like crazy ? Why are we witnessing record sales ? What is your environment like ? The people around you, the corporations, do they use .com, ccTLDs, or new extensions ?

 

[Kate]

I've read somwhere that a possible next step is going to be the possibility to choose the extension just as you choose the name. If this happens, users will be able to determine both what is before and after the dot. For example, I would be able to register ruben.couto and so on.

But the current DNS doesn't work like this. That would mean everybody can freely add 'dynamic' extensions to the root zone. But this has always been a tightly controlled process. It is unlikely that government(s) will allow that.
Just think of the controversy surrounding .xxx or other adult/LGBT extensions. The GAC nearly killed .xxx.
The other aspect is confusion and scalability. Icann will normally reject strings that are 'confusingly similar' to existing extensions, even though we have .picture and pictures etc.

I think, in time and if this happens, along with other internet changes, .com might grow weaker in the way that its relative value may decrease (how much it will decrease may depend on how search engines - or equivalent - will handle the new paradigm of domain names). The way we see and use the internet may change completely.

I have emphasized some keywords in your sentence to illustrate a point

Some newbies/fanbois like to say that the new extensions critics are 'stuck in the past'. They think that because the Internet changes very fast, everything is obsolete soon, but that is not quite true.
The underlying protocols of the Internet that we use as of today were designed in the 80s, in the 70s for some. They are still based on the old RFCs. The DNS was designed in 1983 by Mockapetris and deployment started around 1984-1985. 30-year old technology. But the phone number system is way older and AFAIK it's not broken.
Domain names are Internet infrastructure. In fact, the new extensions work exactly like the old ones. There is no technology shift involved at all.

The thing to remember is that the doomsayers usually have a vested interest and are trying to sell your something. Hype and scare go hand in hand.

 

[Vinod R]

No it will not die down, It may take some years to build up, most of the registries would be out of business by then. Many of them will move to mobile apps. DOT com will decline but not in the very near future, May be some 20 years from now the young generation who sees .club and .news being used and typed in when he grows and reaches 15 years of age, he will have no problem using dot whatever. IMO

 

[Fonzie]

.US was established in 1985...

But it wasn't made available to the public until 2002 and by that time, .com was so far ahead in the minds of the public that it never stood a chance and has remained a massive underperformer (relative to its intuitive potential) to this day.

It (.us) is actually a great choice for a local business since you can get keywords that are otherwise long gone in .com and people intuitively seem to understand it, it has plenty of success stories however anecdotally, we made a local ag operator a site on a HisDomain.us and he suffered from communication breakdowns with his customers who would type in HisDomain.com or HisDomainUS.com.

Given enough time and energy, its possible that in a generaton or two, .com might lose its spot, or at least decline in preeminence but in the year 2015 and for all forseeable future, with the entirety of the grown-up internet on .com and not a single meaningful marketing budget poised towards marketing anything else (try to persuade a Michigan Avenue advertising war room to use a non .com and see how far you get), it ain't going anywhere any time soon and the kinds of people who report of its 'death' are the same idiots who were buying .tel, .co, .etc.

 

[-EM-]

Really?
Do we have to ask the same question over and over for each domain sale or domain use in an other not com TLD?

 

[iowadawg]

Geesh....there is a thread here hashing all this crap out.

 

[Ms Domainer]

Actually, .co isn't doing too badly. It's a solid ccTLD with some good sales attached to it.

At least it makes some kind of sense, not an alphabet soup and eXamine Your Zipper. connotation.

I would be glad if .xyz (or any other new G) would bring attention to the new name spaces (I have a few nice ones, though no xyz), but I'm not optimistic.

Had Google totally rebranded to .xyz, then we might be talking about some serious disruption to the internet, but even the mainstream publications are a bit confused: Is it ABC.xyz or Alphabet.xyz?

The pubs I have read are saying Alphabet and they aren't even mentioning the .xyz.

 

[DomainVP]

The thread was more to point out that people who are being featured as saying .COM is going to be replaced are also the same people who have said other extensions were also going to replace .COM in previous years - and were incorrect.

It's all just very self serving lip service.

 

[xull]

How to overthrown a King with huge popularity? You can't.

There is only 2 type of domains in the domaining world; one is ".com" and the other is "the rest".
Just try to put any domain name in ".com", it will have better impression than '"The Rest".

i.e:
Poop.com is much better than Poop.xyz
W.com is much better than w.xyz
ABC.com is much better than ABC.xyz

Unless you can assure mobile OSs to remove ".com" button in their keypad, dethroning the king is a long way to go.

Just saying.

 

[Kate]

With the name meaning less now, this will have a negative effect on values, particularly with the plethora of new domains available. It doesn't really matter what your domain name is, most people won't use it.

People were already saying the same thing 15 years ago: domain names would become less relevant because of SEO, because people navigate using search engines etc. This is popular thinking among the webmasters who missed the boat
But more and more domain names are being registered. Obviously people are not convinced they are less important than they used to be.

If you are a business, you have business cards. So you will put your corporate E-mail and website URL on them.
Also, you are going to promote specific URLs, if you do advertising. Nowadays a real business must have its own domain name no matter what. Whether people will use it to find you is a different issue.

Telling people to go to facebook or google is not a good idea, because you are not in control. There is no guarantee you will even get the intended result. Imagine if unscrupulous competitors buy prominent google ads on your keywords and steal your customers.

 

[Kenny]

It's like Deja Vu all over again.
This thread (same name, different date) has been resurrected so many times over the years that it reminds me of some running gag.
Except perhaps for their own country codes, outside of those of us directly involved, the general public still has such a limited understanding of what comes after the dot.

Questionable sales of the new .whatevers have been going on since .Info and .Biz were introduced way back when, and the hype will continue with each new extention as they are released.

Now some will say that new search methods will make the C/N/O's less popular. I have to disagree.
The same was said about direct type ins, that search and the ability to just click a link will nullify the advantage of the Com.
Never going to happen.

Yes, there is money to be made on some new exts, but the C/N/O's will always be prevalent in the minds of the non industry public.

Peace,
Cy

 

[Peter]

It's like Deja Vu all over again.
This thread (same name, different date) has been resurrected so many times over the years that it reminds me of some running gag.

Are you seriously suggesting that smart tv's etc haven't killed domains and the browser market :P

God damn it people were so sure.

 

[Fancy.domains]

Hello,

As long as I live, I'm almost certain that COM will remain KING.

It's obvious that people from other registries will do everything to promote their own extensions as "com killers" or whatever.

 

[vdonline]

if(.com==end) internet=end;

 

[J9]

End of .com is near... Sell your all 3 letter and 4 letter .coms to me. I am paying $20 for each 3 letter .com and $5 for each 4 letter .com. Take action fast.... End of .com has arrived...

 

[Fancy.domains]

The COM died, but then sold it's Vegas for +$30 million.

Pretty intense death-throes, I must say.

 

[Charles Sweeney]

Something that hasn't been mentioned. .com is less popular outside the US because other countires have country code domains which are sometimes preferred to .com

The US until very recently didn't have a country code domain so it was .com for them.

I am in the UK. On one of my websites I use the .co.uk name. I have the .com name but prefer to use the .co.uk name to show the site is in the UK and is aimed at the UK. So for me, the .com has little value in this case.

This could explain why not everyone is welded to .com

 

[RU]

TheEndOf.com is taken since 2005 LOL

 

[Fonzie]

Yep

www.HologramUniverse. org

Same guy behind www.1Search. org

Same guy that gave the world the 30Mod Prime Alrorithm

www.PrimeAlgorithm. com

Same guy I've known for over 40 years a pure genius

hehe

Oh, look. Its Sollog aka DomainLords doing that thing where he pretends he's someone else, referring to himself as a 'genius'.

Your routine is played out. You only impress the total new guys, John.