The .PRO Discussion

[InvisionTech]

It seems .PRO is slowly coming out of the cage with cheaper reg prices than they were a year ago and major registrars like netsol taking notice of the extension and promoting it.

Here are some that I picked up in last couple of days:

Alexandria.pro

Anchorage.pro

Arlington.pro

Belfast.pro

Birmingham.pro

Budapest.pro

Durham.pro

Fairfax.pro

Italian.pro

Lisbon.pro

Fire away with your regs after the relaunch on September 8th, 2008.

 

[Kate]

Granted its a typo, but at low $xx reserve if it doesn't sell,

.pro is not an extension that gets any significant type-in, so there is little hope for the typos

 

[akcampbell]

.pro is not an extension that gets any significant type-in, so there is little hope for the typos

I don't think Samit had type-ins in mind. Yacht is commonly misspelled as Yatch (29m Google uniques for the correct spelling versus 0.5m for the misspelling) so it would be misspelled in search engines as Yatch so if you put together a search engine optimised minisite for the misspelling you might get some traffic.

However, if I was a yacht seller, I wouldn't pay for affiliate ads for the misspelled keyword because I would assume anybody with the money to buy or hire a yacht can either spell it correctly or employs somebody who can spell it, either way it would be a waste of advertising. You could argue that the prize of selling a yatch is so lucrative, it would still be worth paying for clicks for the misspelling just in case.

whould you really expect the buyer to say, "ho great deal, a french .pro for 100 000€, i surelly take it" ?

I think the point MJS was making was his counteroffer was as unrealistic as the lowball offer. He didn't expect it to be accepted. People make very unrealistic lowball offers for .pros on Sedo, you get a $200 offer less $150 commission = $50 for a domain that has cost $400 to register since 2005.

 

[mjs]

Dude, Immobilier is a french word. In the domain name french market, there is only 1 domain which has been sold officialy that price. It was "auto.fr" which can be translated as "car.com"

As a point of reference, you may wish to consult dnsaleprice.com for past sales data. ie. see June 2008 sale of sexe.org in the amount of $151,400.

Moreover, immobilier (real estate) is in a big crisys.

Although the future increasingly holds promise for interplanetary migration, for the indefinite future, we are all members of a growing human race confined to a world comprised of limited habitable space, and otherwise dominated by oceans and other water bodies. So long as this is the case, any crisis, if such were to take hold, would be resolved in accordance with the laws of supply and demand. Presumably, the crisis you reference involves the current downturn in global property markets due, in large part, to irresponsible lending practices. Of course, its more complicated than that. But as the saying goes, "this too shall pass". And when it does, try to get your hands on a premium real estate domain. For that matter, seek one during the current crisis. They must be giving them away at this point, yes?

According to namebio, there is not even one pure french word .pro (like immobilier) domain sold in .pro history

Amour.pro was sold in October 2007 for $750. ( Popular alternative to the english word, "love", but clearly on loan from the French )

whould you really expect the buyer to say, "ho great deal, a french .pro for 100 000€, i surelly take it" ?

Sir Campbell already clarified my comment, and has my gratitude.

Thank you, Hakita.

Mike

 

[Soofi]

no friends in high places required.

Arnt you already at one of the highest places paji? :lol:

 

[mwzd]

No baba, I'm just a small time domainer.

And my position on NamePros is courtesy of the fact that I help out.

Anything else you suppose or derive from my postbit is a fabrication of your mind :p

 

[bocanames]

Any other registrar worth transferring .PROs to other than the $29 and $39 renewal murder at some?

domainpeople.com - $19.95 been using them frequently in recent months

need a good laugh? Twitter / dotprodomains: who wants a drunken paveme ...

 

[siga]

Came across this today, Quotes.Pro

Looks like a nice clean design.

 

[AlexTampa]

Came across this today, Quotes.Pro

Looks like a nice clean design.

i agree, a lot of potential there

 

[sky]

Who was it said that they wanted to know about keyword .PRO domains people are dropping?

I have some .PRO domain names that are dropping in a month or two, and I'm toying around with the idea of which I'll renew and which I'll drop. In any case I'm going to be having some names you want to pick over. If you want to make me an offer. I'm going to post a list of domains in the namepros sales forum later, and you can contact me privately I suppose with any offers.

 

[akcampbell]

I sure hope this will sell; hiring.pro, speech.pro, hairstyling.pro, renovation.pro, fiscal.pro. I got these today. I sure hope I wasn't naive. I really want my wife to see me actually make some money for domain investments by now.

Sky, you posted this in Oct 07. Are you divorced yet?! Have you considered doing a "Bernie" (Madoff), tell your wife your .pro portfolio goes up in value by 25% per year, that way she'll never expect you to sell anything. In 2055, when she realises it was all horse$h%t, you'll be dead, but you'll have enjoyed a lifetime of hot dinners and cordial relations.

http://www.geoffreyjames.com/bigstockphoto_Young_Man_Giving_Thumbs_Up_Sig_2435620.jpg

 

[sky]

Sky, you posted this in Oct 07. Are you divorced yet?! Have you considered doing a "Bernie" (Madoff), tell your wife your .pro portfolio goes up in value by 25% per year, that way she'll never expect you to sell anything. In 2055, when she realises it was all horse$h%t, you'll be dead, but you'll have enjoyed a lifetime of hot dinners and cordial relations.

http://www.geoffreyjames.com/bigstockphoto_Young_Man_Giving_Thumbs_Up_Sig_2435620.jpg

LOL! My whole perspective on domaining has changed a lot in the past year, and in the past 6 months in particular. I've learned a lot, both by reading, and experientially.

I have some .PROs I'm going to renew indefinitely, because I know I have enough personal motivation to develop them, as they are relevant to my interests and hobbies. For me, that's important. Other people might have a different hobby or interest set, be shrewder or use other domain strategies based on different perceptions of practicality.

The one's I'm selling now are actually good keywords, as determined by their overall estibot stats. But I've developed a few sites now to get an idea about what is involved, affiliate programs, SERP, etc... for example, oled .pro, guitarfingernails.com, 48PortSwitch.com.

GuitarFingernails.com for example is ranked near the top of its niche and makes 20+ hits a day. A little ad revenue, not much yet. oled .pro is not getting much traffic yet. Still trying to get some rank on Google. Have some on a couple of other search engines.

So, now that and I have a better idea of how much effort is involved in building up a site and getting SERP, I realize the effort it would take to do that with all of my .PROs. I just can't afford to hold onto names I know I am not ambitious enough to develop. And that's just for traffic... as for finding/selling to industry specific motivated end-users ... haven't really figured that game out. So I'm giving up on the "long tail" strategy to domaining and just developing stuff close to my heart.

Domain posts are on namepros now in "fixed price" category.

robot.pro and robots.pro (only selling as a pair), $300 - SOLD
wife.pro, $60 - SOLD
girlfriend.pro, $60 -SOLD
refrigherator.pro, $60 -SOLD
speech.pro $75 -SOLD

survival.pro $150
keyboard.pro, $150
performance.pro, $150
treadmill.pro, $150 (With mini-site by http://aeiou.com)
drama.pro, $150
generator.pro and generators.pro (only selling as a pair): $100
sail.pro $75
want.pro, $60
hairstyles.pro, $60
queen.pro $50
socks.pro, $50
wicked.pro, $20
phonefinder.pro, $20

 

[d0main]

One of the best .pro's is now available for purchase for the first time!

Park.pro

Perfect for the domain parking company

Created during the first public .pro landrush.

Make offer here
http://www.namepros.com/domains-for...pro-premium-aged-pro-parking.html#post3508130

 

[mwzd]

I want to upgrade my .pro portfolio, but its so tough to sell names in the reseller market its not worth it mostly.

I'd love to have a top 25 keyword, if anyone is selling cars.pro or love.pro or travel.pro please let me know. :D

I'm happy with most of my names tbh, would cost me at least 100x if not more in .com or even in .net

 

[sky]

I want to upgrade my .pro portfolio, but its so tough to sell names in the reseller market its not worth it mostly.

I'd love to have a top 25 keyword, if anyone is selling cars.pro or love.pro or travel.pro please let me know. :D

I'm happy with most of my names tbh, would cost me at least 100x if not more in .com or even in .net

What would you do with a name like "cars.pro"? Would you develop it or sell it to an interested industry buyer? I mean, it would be very hard to make cars.<anything> profitable because of the huge competition and investment in the web development and marketing it would take to get it to stand out in the crowd and float to the top of a search engine search.

Take for example my name oled dot pro. I have a website up there. I've got a lot more work to do, but it has some nice content there, meta tags are good, basic SEO is in place, perfect keyword domain. Google has indexed it but it doesn't show up in the first 50-200 pages... (a couple of other search engines have it ranked higher though).
And that is the OLED keyword itself, a new technology. I have the same problem with 48portswitch.com - hard to get ranked for "48 port switch" due to competition, so cars.pro - wow. So who'd buy it, and how much could you get based on existing .pro sales? $500? $1000? $2000 tops?

And how much would you pay for cars.pro? Or how many .PRO domains would you have to register and renew to sell a name like cars.pro in your lifetime? When the investment and income is all considered would you be making a profit? Or at least a profit worth mentioning?


I'm focusing now on .PROs I'd actually want to develop into a site and build traffic for, in niches I'm motivated enough to find the content I can actually be competitive with, and get some traffic for. And I have more of those kind of .PROs than I can get around to anytime soon, so even some of those I'm selling. Although if I don't find buyers I may renew and look for a motivated buyer or try to develop anyway.

I bet it would be very hard to find people who both have the business case to make good use of such of a name like cars.pro, are qualified to own it, and who would pay top dollar for it. From the standpoint of getting ranked on google, having a good keyword is best if it is .com for type-in, I think. Who's typing in keyword.pro? It's always keyword.com. And since cars.com is gone, and most of the industry-niche buyers aren't into selling re-domains just for the domain name's face resale value, probably something like coolest-cars.com would be just fine for them, because getting it visible is more about the SEO and marketing $ than whether it's a keyword or not. And in an end-user Google look up coolest-cars.com would probably be the kind of thing someone would click on if they saw it. Maybe or maybe as much as cars.com itself.

 

[mwzd]

I could/would develop any major generic I manage to acquire. Why you never even see some of my .pros up for sale at all, I'm developing them slowly but steadily between paid projects.

I'm primarily a developer, even now most of my revenue doesn't come from domains but services including web development for companies in 10 countries or so.

And a generic like that I'd be stupid to sell at domain value, buy is another matter :lol: a pro developed site on a top level generic will always be worth a ton more in revenues that just the domain, specially a .pro which doesn't have much parking income worth talking about.

 

[sky]

I could/would develop any major generic I manage to acquire. Why you never even see some of my .pros up for sale at all, I'm developing them slowly but steadily between paid projects.

I'm primarily a developer, even now most of my revenue doesn't come from domains but services including web development for companies in 10 countries or so.

And a generic like that I'd be stupid to sell at domain value, buy is another matter :lol: a pro developed site on a top level generic will always be worth a ton more in revenues that just the domain, specially a .pro which doesn't have much parking income worth talking about.

O k a y ... I'm a developer too. Right now I'm just doing joomla sites primarily but the domains I've developed that I'm serious about offering a service from will transcend Joomla and get well into the coding. But the point is, how in the world would you ever expect to capitalize on cars.pro even if you owned it? Why do you think it would not be buried on page 350 unless you invested a lot into it and made it your full time passion for a long time? It's so competitive. For example, my domain 48portswitch dot com - very competitive industry. Strong keyword match. Appraises for $21,000 on Estibot because it has so many great things going for it for various statistics. But I can't get it to stand out in the crowd, and I've even put a some good content up there. And even though I *can* develop it, and turn it into a much hotter site than it is now to compete, I don't want to spend my whole life just trying to compete and create a website to market 48 port switches. There are only so many hours in a day regardless how good a developer is.

I think that's why the Estibot founder, who posted an RSS feed (and subsequently pulled it) showing his technique for finding and using non-competitive niche sites looks for a balance between a strong keyword and low-competition so his site can get top billing in a category. Realistically, how many sites can you develop for a competitive area? I also own treadmills.pro - ads get a lot of revenue for treadmills, but try standing out in the crowd. I have a nice minisite I got from aeiou.com. They did the SEO (they said) and I embellished the content a lot. Re-wrote most of it. Google doesn't even rank it. Whereas my site guitarfingernails dot com, it's right up there in the keyword search for guitar fingernails and gets traffic because there isn't overwhelming competition.

 

[mwzd]

But the point is, how in the world would you ever expect to capitalize on cars.pro even if you owned it? Why do you think it would not be buried on page 350 unless you invested a lot into it and made it your full time passion for a long time? It's so competitive.

Paintball Pro - have spent a little less than $500 on it, including design and content, and a lot less than 'full passion for long time' into it. More like 4 hours in total. :p

It is competitive, why people don't hesitate to pay us what we ask for, we don't look at how much we can take the client for, but how much revenue we can generate for the client to help us make a lot more than just a one time project development cost. Its a different approach from most run of the mill web dev companies and one that has held us in good stead since 1995.

For example, my domain 48portswitch dot com - very competitive industry. Strong keyword match. Appraises for $21,000 on Estibot because it has so many great things going for it for various statistics. But I can't get it to stand out in the crowd, and I've even put a some good content up there. And even though I *can* develop it, and turn it into a much hotter site than it is now to compete, I don't want to spend my whole life just trying to compete and create a website to market 48 port switches. There are only so many hours in a day regardless how good a developer is.

Dude, if you still consider cars.pro in the same league as 48portswitch dot com, I'd really recommend you spend some more time reading.

There are only so many people who are interested in the subject matter you're talking about, maybe about 5% of those people would be online, so your target market is extremely limited.

Everyone, everywhere is interested in cars, a lot more of that subset is online, hence its easier to get traction on a generic like that. As a developer thats common sense.

Though .pro is not as easy to do seo for google even now, the generic nature of the domain itself adds to brand value and a decent amount of uncluttered content makes it enjoyable to visit. Update it often enough and get repeat visitors. The more content you add, the more visitors you get. Simple really. :lol:

 

[sky]

Paintball Pro - have spent a little less than $500 on it, including design and content, and a lot less than 'full passion for long time' into it. More like 4 hours in total. :p

It is competitive, why people don't hesitate to pay us what we ask for, we don't look at how much we can take the client for, but how much revenue we can generate for the client to help us make a lot more than just a one time project development cost. Its a different approach from most run of the mill web dev companies and one that has held us in good stead since 1995.



Dude, if you still consider cars.pro in the same league as 48portswitch dot com, I'd really recommend you spend some more time reading.

There are only so many people who are interested in the subject matter you're talking about, maybe about 5% of those people would be online, so your target market is extremely limited.

Everyone, everywhere is interested in cars, a lot more of that subset is online, hence its easier to get traction on a generic like that. As a developer thats common sense.

Though .pro is not as easy to do seo for google even now, the generic nature of the domain itself adds to brand value and a decent amount of uncluttered content makes it enjoyable to visit. Update it often enough and get repeat visitors. The more content you add, the more visitors you get. Simple really. :lol:

I think you missed my point. I don't think 48portswitch dot com is in the same league as the cars.com, or cars.pro. Sure appraises higher than cars.pro on estibot though. cars.pro only appraises at $3000 there. queen.pro appraises for $4800. I don't take these valuations seriously except as summaries of many statistics compiled by estibot relative to one another. But my point is that cars.pro is even *more* generic and competitive than 48portswitch dot com, which I cannot even get ranked. oled dot pro - hot technology, less traffic than cars.pro - still hard to get traffic even with decent content. And beyond traffic, then there's ad revenue. How much do ads have to pay out and how many clicks do you need to get to justify adding new content all the time? How many visits/day do you have to get to get one click? And how much does that click pay out?

If it's crappy generic content people aren't going to keep coming back for more, and good content requires time and dedication. I'm saying, how many sites can you really dedicate enough of your time to and make competitive AND make a profit from?

I mean the long tail strategy (a lot of obscure niche sites that get the occasional nibble), take a fair amount of effort to make useful. So you have to spend a lot of time and money to get a high enough volume of those sites to make any decent income at all. That's one way to go. And then you're spending all of your time doing and managing really mundane crap (IMO). After fooling around a little with that, I've decided my life is more valuable than to bow to the lowest common denominator and do boring mundane work on things that scarcely interest me.

My new strategy is to use my coding skills (and not everyone has them) to develop something really unique and valuable and build maybe a few sites up into profitable entities that way. I'd be much more fulfilled and self-satisfied if I was producing something like that, than just working all the time to make quasi-useful BS sites and doing that dance.

But that's just me. If I've got something wrong, or there's a way to do it better, I'm all ears. I'm really just asking the questions. I have a some .PRO's that appraise as high or higher than cars.pro. And frankly if I owned cars.pro I personally would be at a loss as to how to make money beyond trying to find a motivated buyer.

If you ever do succeed well with a name like that, please reply to this thread so I can have a look; and share some of your insights with us. Currently, I'm just offering the best of what I've learned. But I still have a lot to learn.

 

[steveteva]

Since I've been here in late 2004 and reading, reading threads about all tlds other than .com, it is hardly possible to SEO and rank well any website like .pro on competitive keywords. There are some exeptions but .com is king, I already post this many time, Google don't see equal with .com, you can try prove me that I'm wrong but I know 100% sure what I' talking about. That's why big domainers buy .com for millions every years.
What I do believe is that a generic in any tld is wonderful for marketing and advertising and that's the only positive point. If you own car.pro, adding this to marketing materials is better than long dot com name as it's short and easy to remember but if you'll try to compete with car.com with the best, unique contents.... all your money and time can put on will be a lost.
So if I own treadmills.pro I won't lie to a buyer saying you will get high ranked like on top 10 with keyword "treadmills" but I'll say yes it's the best domain you can find to promote treadmills on marketing materials and advertising (radio, tv, newspapers, magazines...)and end user (companies) are willing to spend several thousand dollar to get a name like this or other generic like car.pro...

The exeption of any tld that rank high is if your website is community related, where many people goes everyday for something that is not available in a .com and ccTLDs too are exeption, they rank high in their respective country and language. I own a generic name it's blog in french "b l o g u e .ca" a cctld that is top ranked for french canadian.

 

[akcampbell]

I agree with Sky on the Cars.pro point. I'd put "Travel" in my top 25 .pro keywords but I wouldn't include "Cars", "Love" wouldn't be in my top 1,000, it doesn't work with .pro.

People say, give me an example of a .pro on the first page of Google. The problem is until recently there were no long tail 2 and 3 word .pros registered and it would be nearly impossible to rank on the first couple of pages for Cars with Cars.pro. Yes you could use 2 and 3 word key phrases in your content and metatags with Cars.pro but then from an SEO angle you might as well put the whole search phrase in the domain name.

Nobody is going to type in Cars.pro so that leaves branding as your only option. That's a risky option with .pro because if you had a radio jingle and mention a .pro domain only 1 in 10,000 people will know what you're talking about. People won't recognise a .pro domain name if you put it in on a business card or leaflet and that lack of recognition will undermine your credibility and waste your advertising spend.

Google doesn't discriminate directly against alternative extensions but it likes old continuously regged domains and with .pro that can only be 2004 and more likely 2005 and newer. The only time I got on the top page of Google was with a 1998 .com 2 word generic phrase. I didn't make much money when I was on the first page because the phrase is only searched for 1,200 per month.

I develop at weekends and I'm not convinced things are as simple as Samit makes out. With my first .com development, I coded it all from scratch, it took me the best part of a year to do excluding an initial year of evening classes and online learning and reading. I put issued several press releases, blogged about it, did two BBC radio interviews, got a mention in the online version of Der Spiegel, I wouldn't say it nowhere but the end result didn't justify the effort I put into it.

My latest project is a .org, The keyphrase isn't registered .in .pro and I haven't got any plans to register it. I see very limited value in Joomla and WordPress conveyor belt sites. If you want to create something useful to end users, it has to be sweated over and original. That can only be done by painful line by line coding and monotonous database building. It's difficult to justify putting in that amount of effort into a .pro when hardly anybody has heard of it and RegistryPro does virtually nothing to promote it.