There is no shortage of dreamers in this industry

[Kate]

Over the last 24 hours I noticed that nearly 700 .vg domains were registered. Most are short LN or NL domains, there a few generics too. It seems that a German company has been on a buying spree. The domains are parked at Sedo.

Here is a sample:

BW.VG
C0.VG
C1.VG
C2.VG
C3.VG
C4.VG
C5.VG
C6.VG
C7.VG
C8.VG
C9.VG
CI.VG
CLOUD.VG
CPS.VG
CX.VG

I have nothing against the TLD of the British Virgin Islands but it is what you call an exotic extension. The local market is very tiny (pop. <30,000) so .vg is typically used as a vanity URL by people who have no connection whatsoever to the British Virgin Islands.

How much do these names cost ? At least $25 retail I think, so do the math. But the strange thing is that the holder appears to be registrar/reseller judging by the whois record, but doesn't show up on the official list of .vg registrars.
Maybe there is something I don't know, but right now all I see is a huge waste of money.
I mean, what were they thinking ?

 

[mjnels]

the LLL.mobi buyout when it was 2 year minimum registration cost the registrant about 100k i'd imagine.. also the NNNN.mobi buyout cost the registrant around the same.. all ended up dropping. they're both here somewhere..

 

[ecalc]

They picked up business_ today and and games_ yesterday. Maybe the registrar had a 'buy 2 get 698 free' sale.

available:
sailing.vg
information.vg
electricity.vg
fuel.vg
rooms.vg
people.vg
etc.

 

[Kate]

the LLL.mobi buyout when it was 2 year minimum registration cost the registrant about 100k i'd imagine..

You mean some people bought thousands of LLL/NNNN.mobi ? I didn't quite follow this. Scary indeed.

I know there have always been buying sprees like that involving domain names, 24hournames must be one of the oldest such experiments (and the worst).
But they sometimes also take place in oddball TLDs that have no prospects of massive growth really.

There's also that guy who wasted 100K on domains like toyota.me etc. In fact I'm baffled at the gambling mentality. Just wanted to share :hearts:

 

[biggie]

I'm baffled at the gambling mentality.

:talk:

don't be baffled


we all take gambles, even with .com


so it's just an extension of that.



also, if whoever is regging those .vg, currently has a revenue source...those registrations will/can be an expense against the earnings.

so in that respect, it could be done for taxes.

 

[mjnels]

yea, when there were about 5,000 LLL.mobi left and after the flowers.mobi sale some guy bought them out.. and to be fair he was not a newbie. i actually bought 100 from him @ $70ea when they were on their way down and flipped them. the reason i didnt register any myself initially is it didnt make sense and i thought trading LLL.mobi was silly when there were still decent keywords available and $200ea was clearly way way way inflated price. but logic be damned - even said in a couple of my sales threads that the price will definitely be going down and it didnt matter people still wanted em.

then we have the NNNN.mobi buyout guy which was somewhere between 4,500-5,500 of them registered at godaddy @ 2 year minimum, so $20each!!! i got a call a few days later from the guy, who was from israel and claimed he was going to use them for "a program"... it sounded to me like he was just a speculator but dont know 100%.. anyway, he bought about 100 repeating digit NNNN.mobi from me for $100ea..

lastly, i am guilty of buying out L-L.mobi and N-N.mobi.. i figured if you cant beat em join em. people say "pump and dump" but at the time you didnt even need to pump anything up - you could blatantly admit its a stupid idea and it didnt matter. the frenzy was out of control but if the registrars were making money i wanted a piece too. few days after that ridiculous buyout the main newspaper here in san diego bought U-T dot mobi for 3k and the rest flipped to speculators.. most sit available for registration now.

fast forward to 2012 and i think one of the main reasons stuff like this wont work even for a short period of time - is the aspiring domainer crowd has thinned out bigtime and reality has set back in.. there was sort of a craze between 2006-2010 with new people (myself included) delving into the domain world..

 

[biggie]

fast forward to 2012 and i think one of the main reasons stuff like this wont work even for a short period of time - is the aspiring domainer crowd has thinned out bigtime and reality has set back in.. there was sort of a craze between 2006-2010 with new people (myself included) delving into the domain world..

:talk:

i remember quite well the frenzied fiasco that was ignited imo, by flowers.mobi

conversations got so heated, some folks got temp bans for defending their .mobi and the rose colored perception of it's future.


the basic logic was that smartphones would have .mobi somewhere on them...like a fb icon today and that web applications would be config'ed for .mobi,.

but when pictures of an iphone surfaced showing the browser's url bar and the web address ended in a .com extension, that blew the .mobi bubble apart.


still, that same type of frenzied speculation will happen again.



because there will always be newbies and there will always be speculation.

there will always be hype, perpetrated by the self-proclaimed or industry ordained leaders and pioneers of domaining....who influence and steer the crowd.

there will always be the feeling of "am i missing out"


i too regged a couple of .mobi's (4 total) and only sold one, that sale covered the cost of all and left me some profit change.



but you can see same frenzy with .co and .xxx and many are just waiting for gtlds, so they can buy and hype them too.

it's all a gamble, which could be based on dreams of wealth or just having enough money to eat today.

 

[mjnels]

new gTLDs will change things quickly though. i dont think the frenzy for each TLD in the domain world will be as extreme (crazy buyouts, long domains in alt. TLDs that wouldnt even sell in .com, etc..)

i mean how could it be with hundreds a year getting approved.. the enthusiasm will get spread more thin and maybe even to a reasonable level as people learn.. still this is an interesting time to be witnessing no matter what your opinion..

about the .mobi talk in 2006 - i found it funny one of the arguments people were using against it - is that people dont use "cellphones" for the internet, its impractical with a small screen, only certain things like news, sports, etc.. really this argument had nothing to do with .mobi at all and in 2012 nobody would even use this argument.

the .mobi hype surprised me too - i pre-registered 50-60 initially and did not expect all the fuss on the forums. i didnt necessarily buy into the made up domainer talk about a .mobi button, or it becoming a "standard", just thought good keywords would be cool when this whole mobile thing takes off. everything else that followed was shocking and the biggest mistake i made was buying aftermarket keywords for $X,XXX and not being able to flip some of them. should have just stuck with handregs and would have done MUCH better..lesson learned.

and happy birthday to .mobi who is 6 years old and started first grade yesterday on sept.26th. not a celebrity anymore though..

 

[Kate]

fast forward to 2012 and i think one of the main reasons stuff like this wont work even for a short period of time - is the aspiring domainer crowd has thinned out bigtime and reality has set back in.. there was sort of a craze between 2006-2010 with new people (myself included) delving into the domain world..

I'm not so sure, because newcomers enter (and exit) the biz every day.
Now I think the dust has settled a little bit, because TLDs have been released at a sustained rate over the last few years (like 1/year), so there is a sense of domain fatigue taking hold. Perhaps domainers are beginning to understand they have been taken for a ride.
The problem is that a lot of money was wasted, now domainers are hardly trading anymore, the D2D market is flat and there is much less liquidity. I think it's not just because of the economy, the bad gambles also have had an impact.

I have seen a few speculators get burnt with .mobi, then they would repeat the same mistake with .asia or whatever. Sometimes people are relunctant to learn, then tragedy becomes comedy.
When you think of it, there are irrational things being said on this very forum too.

Not so long ago, there was a thread on here about a guy who had registered 500 .xxx domains at $80 a pop, many were available in other extensions, even .com. Clearly a case of throwing money at random.

Will new gTLDs change that ? Not so much imo, because you have people that get infatuated with one particular extension and think it has a bright future (regardless of history and observed trends).

Also, the speculation will spread across a much larger number of extensions, which means less competition relatively. I think less competition will in fact encourage newbies to take positions because there are more 'opportunities' left. But the majority of all those extensions will be equally worthless anyway.

 

[eurorealtor]

Not so long ago, there was a thread on here about a guy who had registered 500 .xxx domains at $80 a pop, many were available in other extensions, even .com. Clearly a case of throwing money at random.

Just seen, someone put up for sale 205 .xxx domains, listed on ebay as premium with buy now price $59k. Honestly most of the names make no sense and wouldn't buy even in .com extension.

 

[-EM-]

games_ yesterday.

Great reg.

 

[painperdu]

The .vg's you have listed are all server names. It looks like someone is going to brand their cloud server farm with .vg. Virtual Gatway? Video Game?

 

[biggie]

The .vg's you have listed are all server names. It looks like someone is going to brand their cloud server farm with .vg. Virtual Gatway? Video Game?

:talk:


while out at the

Vampire Graveyard

i heard a


Vicious Growl

that sounded

Very Grotesque

but when i turned a saw those


Voluptuous Girls


wearing


Veiled Garments

i ....