sales Unusual Week for Domain Sales: Non .Coms Outnumber .Coms 11-9 on New Top 20 Chart

[Ron Jackson]

The new weekly domain sales report is out at DNJournal.com. As you know, .Coms normally dominate our weekly all extension Top 20 Sales Chart but this was one of those rare weeks when that wasn't the case. The .coms did, as usual, post the week's biggest sale and they had more chart entries than any other single TLD - nine in all - however, this time around the track, non .com domains shared in the bounty as well. They piled up 11 places on the leader board including seven non .com gTLDs (five of which were new gTLDs, including one of the year’s 10 biggest in that category) and four ccTLDs. You can get all of the details here: http://www.dnjournal.com/archive/domainsales/2018/20180815.htm

 

[Josytal]

It's not picking up. You just had 26 weeks of Registry sales dumped in that chart vs. 1 week of .com sales. Then there were only 5 that made that top 20 list.

Thanks. All the same, good news!

 

[DomainFQ.com]

Great Info thanks for sharing

 

[Bob Hawkes]

While I find the ngTLD overall sales picture (admittedly registry dominated at top end) at least slightly encouraging in terms of momentum, but would also agree that a single weekly report that deals only with large sales by itself is of limited significance.

The discussion in this thread lead me to look back at the last 10 pages of archived NameBio daily reports to see who has was in first on each report. Results below:

• com 75
• all other cc not listed below 7 (2 in de, 1 each in co.uk, al, fi, us and ch)
• ngTLD 4
• net 4
• io 3
• co 2
• org 2
• legacy gTLD (asia) 1

I did these by hand making ticks, I may well have missed one or two, but this presents a substantial picture that com lead about 75% of time.

ps Interestingly if you did scale by registration numbers, picture rather equal except cc under represented, but numbers too small to be significant and these only show the highest for a day. Total sales dollars a better measure of momentum.

 

[JB Lions]

While I find the ngTLD overall sales picture (admittedly registry dominated at top end) at least slightly encouraging in terms of momentum, but would also agree that a single weekly report that deals only with large sales by itself is of limited significance.

The discussion in this thread lead me to look back at the last 10 pages of archived NameBio daily reports to see who has was in first on each report. Results below:

• com 75
• all other cc not listed below 7 (2 in de, 1 each in co.uk, al, fi, us and ch)
• ngTLD 4
• net 4
• io 3
• co 2
• org 2
• legacy gTLD (asia) 1

I did these by hand making ticks, I may well have missed one or two, but this presents a substantial picture that com lead about 75% of time.

ps Interestingly if you did scale by registration numbers, picture rather equal except cc under represented, but numbers too small to be significant and these only show the highest for a day. Total sales dollars a better measure of momentum.

That's not even a good picture.

io - 3
new gtlds - 4 but there are literally hundreds of these, or .net alone = all new gtlds together.

Not going to count them all but about 400 unrestricted? - https://ntldstats.com/tld

out of new gTLDs: 1226

 

[Kate]

I do hold the opinion that new gtld domain sales will increase over the next several years. Also, IMO a sale is a sale, I'm not concerned about whether its a registry sale or otherwise, it still shows that some companies out there are already seeing a value in ngtld names even after just 4 years.

A sale is a sale, but when the sales are always made by your competitors or somebody else than you, then those sales do nothing for your bottom line.

I would be concerned if I were a nTLD investor. If the reported sales consistently come from the registries then it is confirmation there is no level playing field. They have the inventory and the distribution channels. And they are competing against you. Why don't we see similar sales made by domainers at least equally often ? I mean noteworthy sales, not $250 sales.

At least it keeps the hopeful hoping.

You must be thinking about trickle-down. The registries making sales will at least build awareness among end users, thus fostering increasing demand over the long term.
But the critical mass isn't there, trickle-down from a pee is insignificant.
And domainers cannot afford to wait 10 or 20 years to see their investment mature.
In fact new domain extensions usually do not appreciate over time.
For example .biz is old but still worthless, even tanking further.

Time flies, the nTLD program is already in the fifth years, so they are not 'new' anymore. They are already old news.

You can give it another 5 years if you want, but then a decade will have gone by and you'll realize your can't move the goalposts forever.

 

[garptrader]

Kate
Good point - New TLD investors like to knock legacy extensions as old and behind the times. But new TLDs are now getting to a point where they are no longer new. NTLDs have now been around for several years but the evidence is clear - occasional registry speaker to hype the extension and renewals but the portfolio turn of a typical new TLD portfolio is maybe one in a thousand domains.

 

[wurdd]

This is the registry releasing the names in batches. Six months of names. You'll realize it's not real news, if you go look at the list.

It's so easy to get pulled in by the hype. I bought around thirty PERFECT dot online in my niche early on. I was very excited about it. These were domains that if I had even marginally in .com would have set me up for life. I developed five of them and got no traffic at all. None whatsoever! The sites never got above page 10 in Google or Bing. Set me back a few months of my time. I can get traffic and decent rankings on the crappiest .com, .net or .org out there, but never had an ounce of success with these new domains.

That being said, the kicker here is email, it will always be email. Call it email security, email bleed, misdirected email, whatever. If I tell someone my email is [email protected], half the time they're gonna send it to [email protected]. This is a fact. You would not believe some of the emails that get sent to the wrong address. Pics of drivers licenses, NDAs, confidential price lists, quotes, cheaters, hospital information, student information, you name it, it gets misaddressed and sent.

Let me give a crystal clear example. I own airconditioning.online (or airconditioning.wtfever for that matter) and I compete against airconditioning.com. You want to guess what happens? My customers are sending confidential emails to my competition on a daily basis. It's not my fault. I know the difference between dot online and dot com. I tell them I'm dot online not dot com. I try to educate my customers about my domain name. Guess what? Your customers do not know the difference!!!!!! They do not care about domain names!!!!!! Your customer just sent your confidential price quote to the competition!!!!! Your customer knows dot com, they don't know dot wtfever!!!!!! All you've done is waste time and money. If you own or start a business, you get the shortest and most meaningful dot com you can afford. Period.

For arguments sake. Test it! Do some research on your own. Set up catch all email on a decent dot com, one with dot net, dot org, dot whatever domains developed and being used. If you aren't using a short, descriptive, easy to spell and remember dot com for your business, I 100% guarantee that you will lose emails to the registrant of that short, descriptive, easy to spell and remember dot com. I hope it's not the competition.

I was just as big a fan about the new domains when I first started, too. They had the potential to level the playing field for the guys that came late. They were supposed to be the perfect match of left and right. What's happened is the opposite. They're not for business. They're too confusing, spammy looking, and expensive. And, most don't make any sense at all. Origin.tech for $10k! And, I'm not supposed to laugh and shake my head. The registry is the only one making money here, people.

 

[Bob Hawkes]

While I am sure at times there are email confusion issues as @wurdd states, the same can I am sure be said about .io, .co, .net and many others (and the same happens here in Canada between .ca and .com, Canadian companies with only one sometimes encounter difficulties). It is also significant though that the podcast that Andrew did with some ngTLD business owners he asked them exactly this question, and none indicated an issue at all with respect to email. It is also interesting that the person who bought home.loans had operated for several years another .loans so presumably had that been a problem then he would not have repeated it, especially when they needed to pay $500,000 for the ngTLD.

I don't know the answer to this, but I wonder how much email is by people typing in an address from a conversation or memory, and not from a business card, information sheet, or via a link in a received email, social media, a company webpage, etc.

 

[Bob Hawkes]

That's not even a good picture.

io - 3
new gtlds - 4 but there are literally hundreds of these, or .net alone = all new gtlds together.

Not going to count them all but about 400 unrestricted? - https://ntldstats.com/tld

out of new gTLDs: 1226

Hi @JB Lions ,

Just to clarify, I wasn't offering the data in order to try to "present a good picture". I don't take it as my role to always argue in favour of ngTLDs or anything else for that matter. I like to bring broader, quantitative data to a question. What that data suggests is what I believe. Here, I was broadening the dataset, even though I knew that would support most of the time .com will lead, urging people to view this week within a broader context.

Re the second point, yes it is true there are (too!) many extensions! However, the whole idea of most of the new extensions were that they would serve a niche. Whereas a net or com (or site or xyz) might serve almost any topic, the idea was that extensions like .design, .science, etc. were intended to be used in a much narrower realm. There will never be 100 or even 20 million registrations in a specialized narrow extension. I think the relevant comparator is not with the number of extensions, but rather the number of registered and/or for sale domain names.

There are roughly 20 million ngTLD, roughly 134 million .com and 14.4 million .net. For country code in total about 146.3 million registrations. It is fair to compare with these numbers, in my opinion.

• So 1 ngTLD leads a NameBio report (during this 100 day period) for every 5 million registrations.
• By comparison 1 com leads the same NameBio daily report period for about every 1.8 million registrations.
• For net the numbers would be 1 per 3.6 million registrations.
• For country code taken in total about 1 per 11.3 million registrations

But we should not read too much significance into how often domain names appear in the top. The more significant indicators of health of extensions are use in actual websites, total sales volume, average sales price, and especially the trends in those numbers.

Sorry this has gotten long. My main point was to stress that I was not trying to "present a picture".

 

[Kate]

Ironically repurposed ccTLDs like .co but also to some extent .me .io etc are getting more traction among end users than nTLDs. But there are fads too.

Which confirms my assertion that nTLDs are unnecessary because end users have always had plenty of choice and alternatives even before they were introduced.

 

[Addison]

I saw p2p.co appeared in namebio and sold for more than $17k

Superb sale considering "blockchain" is the new "P2P" buzzword.

 

[nomen]

That being said, the kicker here is email, it will always be email. Call it email security, email bleed, misdirected email, whatever. If I tell someone my email is [email protected], half the time they're gonna send it to [email protected]. This is a fact. You would not believe some of the emails that get sent to the wrong address. Pics of drivers licenses, NDAs, confidential price lists, quotes, cheaters, hospital information, student information, you name it, it gets misaddressed and sent.

This is how I see it as well. Email is not to be underestimated when it comes to domains. Too many people, domainers too, think domains (and their life expectancy) through WWW. That, WWW, may very well disappear as we know it but domain names themselves are not going to vanish because of that. Email alone will keep them alive for years to come. And while domain names as identifiers to reach websites allows some creativity when it comes to TLD (because they can be prefixed with www.*), that [email protected] simply doesn't look like an email address. *@gmail.COM, *@hotmail.COM and so on reinforces that fact heavily in the eyes of the public.

 

[Michael Ehrhardt]

The new weekly domain sales report is out at DNJournal.com. As you know, .Coms normally dominate our weekly all extension Top 20 Sales Chart but this was one of those rare weeks when that wasn't the case. The .coms did, as usual, post the week's biggest sale and they had more chart entries than any other single TLD - nine in all - however, this time around the track, non .com domains shared in the bounty as well. They piled up 11 places on the leader board including seven non .com gTLDs (five of which were new gTLDs, including one of the year’s 10 biggest in that category) and four ccTLDs. You can get all of the details here: http://www.dnjournal.com/archive/domainsales/2018/20180815.htm

Time is changing

 

[Bob Hawkes]

I may need to update my analysis (earlier in this thread) by adding more recent data, as the last 10 days have witnessed a fair variety in who is in first place in the NameBio Daily Report.

For past 10 days com has been first 3 times, org twice, and biz, cc, co, info and net once each.

I still think that most of the time my analysis of 100 showing about 3/4 of the time com will lead will hold, but in any one week or two the pattern may be different. I do believe that org is strengthening, and it has now been in lead 2 times in last 10 days, and another 2 in the previous 100 days.