Do you still have to be a "professional" in order to register .pro names, because I fail to see how anyone can be a professional at free games and suchlike...with accreditation from a real licensing body?
You need a business license of some kind and it doesn't have to have anything to do with the keyword in the domain.
If interest is generated in .pro it wont be from the fact it drops, but from the sale prices these dropped domains finally go for.
Very true, I find interest in my .pros is directly correlated with the amount of exposure .pro is getting, whether that be through Sedo auctions, Snapnames drops, RegistryPro rule changes, DNJournal sale reports, even the volume of posts on this thread.
These domains are too good to see in any drop auction for sure, probably will end up selling way under priced too
I think most will go for respectable prices judging by where the bar is now with 2 days of the auction to go. There are between 30-35 bidders on several of the auctions.
The thing to bear in mind is that you can sell a domain that costs $3,000 for $10,000 but you are going to need to hold 20-30 of them to do that. It's like any retail business, if stock turnover is very low, you need big margins to justify tying up the capital in stock and looking after it.
When you have 30-35 bidders some of them may be end users who don't care about selling it on or collectors who will pay more than any future aftermarket buyer will pay for the satisfaction of owning it.
When Snapnames started catching .pros, I had a run of catching domains for $59 before other people cottoned on. Then there was a period where there were 2-3 bidders to divide the spoils with. Now there are too many people in the game for it to be lucrative. For example, I caught Local.pro for $59 on Snapnames and sold it for $3,500.
My experience of .pro has taught me that people will pay between $1,000 and $5,000 for a good .pro but they won't pay any more than that no matter how good the keyword is. You get exceptions, MJS sold Realty.pro for $10,000 and I sold Booking.pro to Booking.com for $7,500 but on the whole these sales are outliers. You have to be prepared to turn down alot of low to mid $X,XXX offers on alot of domain to get one of these.
The financial .pros at auction are top keywords but they don't have the best association with .pro. Association is critical because when people are sifting through 20 viable alternative extensions for a particular keyword, you want your .pro to jump out at them as the best fit with the keyword.
I finalised another .pro sale today, ForSale.pro sold for $1,200. The .org sold for $12,000 and doesn't fit the extension.
