The only buyers are the domainers themselves.
That's not true. Of the 10 .pros I have sold since September 2009, none of the buyers have been pure domainers. By that, I mean people who buy domains only to sell on or park. There is no money in parked .pros, I redirect my 300 .pros to my website Total.pro for that reason. Also, there is no margin in my .pros for a domainer, my average sale price is over $3,000.
The most common buyer type is domainer-developers, people who can and do develop websites, often .pro websites. I am a domainer-developer, I own alot of .pros but I also develop websites as a hobby. My current project is an LLL.com retail site. Other buyer types are corporates buying .pro defensively, for example Booking.com bought Booking.pro; professionals, for example Switch.pro was bought by a Japanese lighting engineer; and people redirecting .pro to developed websites, for example Touch.pro is redirected to TouchWindow.com.
Three interesting features of the .pro market;
1) Professional part time entrepreneurs who like the branding angle and concept of .pro have more money to spend on domain names than the average minisite developer or domainer.
2) Ownership of genuinely premium .pros is concentrated. This restricts the supply of top keywords and so you get fairly high valuations considering how few people have heard of the extension and are eligible to register them when they come up for auction. For example, RealEstate.pro sold for $14,000 at Snapnames in September.
3) The remaining top .pros are owned by people who have invested about $500 in registration fees since 2005 and aren't about to drop them or sell for a small profit now reg fees have fallen 80%. They are professional people who don't need the money. I know how tightly .pros are held because I spent several years trying to buy up every one of them for sale at reseller prices.
All of these factors combine to make .pro not particularly attractive to domainers. Most domainers aren't eligible to register .pro and professionals earn too much money in their day job to be bothered flipping .pros for the equivalent of a couple of hours of their time.
The key buyers of most alternative domain extensions are other domainers, there is often a glut of interest at landrush followed by fewer and fewer sales at lower and lower prices in subsequent years.
.pro burns more slowly, it's taken 5 years for the spark to become a flame and it's still a registry change and the abolitions of residual restrictions away from a fire but the exquisitely beautiful domain names .pro produces like Poker.pro, Game.pro, Golf.pro, Office.pro, and so on, mean it will always have a chance of catching fire.
I'm genuinely grateful that people like yourself and Archangel invest so much of your time for free discussing .pro because it boosts my sales enquiries! :blink:
However, I'm not convinced a forum moderator like Archangel, who is supposed to be neutral, should invest as much time as he does berating .pro. One post should be enough, we get the message, you don't like the extension, move on, haven't you got any moderating to do?
