bocanames said:
Best new reg on this page - Great (in)vision! And a piece of cake to develop or sell. You can make this a profitable site your first year, even if you make mistakes developing it. And no need to dump dirt on people's carpet to demonstrate either.
This is a great example of staying focused. Looking at comps for other extensions and talking about SERPS are OK if you're dying to buy something, and you can't make a decision by any other means. But registering the generic name of a consumer product line that is brandable as a .PRO is money in the bank from my perspective.
Sure sounds like people are regging a lot of crap because the term is searched for a lot, or they like the word. I'll be interested to see the renewal rates for .PRO this time next year. Vacuums may be boring, but I think you'll clean up with this one. But then again, I'm guessing just like the next guy.
I wouldn't describe anything somebody registers as crap when there only 21,000 .pros registered. I think you could say that about .com with 77m registrations but not .pro. If you've been hand regging during an earlier period, new regs will seem a little odd but that's a good thing because it means .pro is making progress. Also, new reg's are costing people $20 instead of $100 so the choices they make will be difference. Some names are worth a punt at $20 but not $100. I agree with what you say about drops next years, if the 60% and 70% discounts turn out to be just that, people will dump at least 1/2 of what they are regging now. That's another good thing though, it puts pressure on RegistryPro to keep reg fees low to maintain momentum and that's in everybody's interests.
I think there are lots of different methods of picking .pros and each can be successful. You like clearly defined products and services and because you started regging in 06 you could make that work for you. I started regging in 07, I could get some nice product categories but I also looked at .pros that were purely brandable, an example might be something like Total.pro which I'm going to develop as a .pro blog at some point.
Comps to other extensions and SERPs are the mainstay of my .pro selection strategy. My theory is for people to be driven down the extension pecking order to .pro, there has to be massive competition for a particular keyword and you can gauge that by benchmarking the developed .coms with that word in. With that strategy in mind, I bought Guide.pro, Review.pro, and Expert.pro.
My logic for not regging Vacuum.pro in 07 was that vacuum cleaners are heavy but relatively cheap so it's not an obvious product for people to buy online. That leaves you selling bags and accessories which is a valuable niche but there are already alot of people doing it and you've got to post out alot of bags to get rich which will hit the amount people will pay for domains.
Also, there are only 24,000 Google indexed site with "vacuum.com" in, 200 uniques for "vacuumpro", 10 bids on Sedo for domains with the keyword vacuum in, and 5 historical sales for domains with the word vacuum in, all those stats are relatively modest. That's not to say Vacuum.pro isn't a great reg, just that on your product and service oriented approach it works and on my SERP's/Sedo bids/historical sales price comp/pro association based method it doesn't do so well.
You dropped Fund.pro a couple of months after Fund.com sold for $10m, Fund.info sold for $15,000 and even Fund.cc sold for $4,000. I couldn't believe you dropped it, that would be absolute heresy based on my .pro analysis method. You offered it for sale at $1,000, withdrew it from sale when the .com sale went through, told everybody it must be worth $5,000, then dropped it. I would have happily paid $1,000. You did the same with Click.pro which isn't a product or service but it's an extremely brandable keyword as the $56,000 sale of Click.net demonstrates.
