Tips on buying single word .info and .tv

[Joe N]

Hey all,

I've been looking at some recently deleted .info and .tv names over the last few days. It's not too hard to find one-word names in these extensions, even ones that get 30K + search matches.

But what is the value of one-word names with these extensions? Have people had much luck selling them at auction? Are they not worth the investment unless it's a really premium (i.e. commercial) keyword?

 

[Nerevar]

The name needs to fit the extension. For .info, it should be a one-word commercial product or service-related, with a broad use, for which that one can do an informational website. Good examples: sailing.info , wallets.info Preferably 100k+ monthly searches.

For .tv it should be a short dictionary word that can reasonably be used as a name for a TV channel (although a very nice and clean CVCV might also work, like Lana.tv or Modo.tv).

 

[Joe N]

@Nerevar - Thanks. Great feedback.

 

[garptrader]

.Info and .TV are not easy to sell so yes the keyword will need significant search volume. With .TV you really need to imagine video content on that type of domain. Otherwise, you just have a keyword which competes with now hundreds of alternative TLDs. In ten years I have never sold a .Info and never received an offer over $100 for one so I have pared my holdings to just a few .info domains. While the occasional .TV sale often competes pricewise with brandable .COM sales, the challenging part of .TV is the much higher renewal cost. $28-$30 renewals get expensive real fast when you have a portfolio of .TV domains. So even with .TV which I like for branding purposes I have had to cut back due to the carrying cost.

But I guess the biggest lesson from .TV - an extension which does have some end user adoption and which has existed for some fifteen years now is that alternative extensions just do not sell at a rate which justifies investing in them except on a limited basis. Thus I have avoided new TLDs like the plague. While there are a few rare individuals who have beaten the odds, most new TLD investors are going to lose their shirts. There are too many competing extensions being launched in a short timeframe, too few end users willing to pay a premium for aftermarket domains (particularly in inferior extensions) and oftentimes acquisition prices or renewals make investing in new TLDs like a trip to Vegas - the house (registries and registrars) most often wins. The sad thing is we have individuals registering mass quantities of new TLDs like cheap lottery tickets. Three to five years from now the drops will be massive (maybe sooner).

 

[Joe N]

@garptrader - Thanks for the opinions. As a newbie, it's great to hear sobering things like this to keep me from loading up on worthless names. Quality over quantity, right?

 

[garptrader]

The sad thing is that end users for the most part just do not place much value on domain names (at least not yet). Even though businesses will spend thousands of dollars on all sorts of normal operating expenses such as travel, marketing/advertising, professional services, IT costs, executive perks, domain names are looked at as an $XX expenditure - just find something that is available even if it is inferior. With .COM we are approaching 120 million registrations so inferior options tend to be three to four words or hyphenated or abbreviated words. But with alt TLDs with far fewer registrations, it is much easier for an end user with a $50 domain budget to just add a word and they can avoid the aftermarket totally. So the best chance to sell a non-.COM domain is to have something which is truly unique.

Another thing I have noticed with some end users who have launched sites where I own the shorter TV version is they brand their site keyword+television.