discuss Why has .net fallen out of favor?

[Lord Antares]

I know that end users and business people in general don't read up and don't care about domains (and they shouldn't).

But why has .net fallen out of favor then? How do they deem it as less valuable if they don't read at all about domaining? What prompted it to decline? Do you think an average end user would know that .nets are less valuable than a couple of years back? It's still the second most popular tld.

 

[garptrader]

.net used to be the #1 alternative extension if the .com was being used or had an unrealistic asking price. We now have some 500 alternate extensions. Some are newer than .net but who considers a three to five year old car or laptop or cell phone new? .net makes more sense for a web presence than .top or.xyz and most other post-2013 releases. But yes selling .net domains even for good keywords is not easy. I have dropped about 90 percent of the .net domains I once owned. So why would I pay a premium price plus renewals for another hard to sell unheard of extension?

 

[BrandEntrance.com]

.net makes more sense for a web presence than .top or.xyz and most other post-2013 releases.

Agreed.

 

[BrandableDomain]

Actual numbers lend weight to the general consensus on this thread.

A November report from CENTR showed that over the previous year, dot com grew by 5 percent, while dot net declined by 6 percent. And dot info declined by a huge 17 percent.

However, dot org held the line strongly (despite the powerful wave of 500 new gTLDs) and only declined a tiny half of one percent.

I feel this is because of its unique and trusted identity, while dot net is just a second choice after dot com and lacks personality.

Dot info has probably declined so much because there are now so many competitive new extensions on offer.

You can download the report - “CENTRstats Global TLD Report Q3 2018 – Edition 25” from this link (PDF):

https://www.centr.org/library/library/statistics-report/centrstats-global-tld-report-2018-3.html

I think you have to be careful before comparing growth in dot coms (which are basically “sold out”) with all other extensions because they mostly have many unregistered but meaningful names still available.

Also, dot top had massive growth according to the report, but you have to consider that that string probably had ridiculous low price promotions. (Dot top is currently losing massive amounts of registrations since the report was released.)

The next report may well be very different.

 

[BrandableDomain]

Surely, there must be at least one .net site we all use regularly or even on a daily basis.

I spend far more time on ExpiredDomains.net than on any dot com in the universe

 

[ivey]

.Net could not maintain their branding as the go to tech domain after .com...so it became .coms sidechick... that no longer had an identity. Other extensions like >org has a clear identity(organizations/non profit).

So even though .net had/has more registered urls...they were mostly not developed. Today .net has a 90's vibes. It's like the Nokia of extensions or the windows 95 of extensions.

Only branding can change the bad perception. It needs a rebirth.
Honestly I would take Love.org over love.net. sorry. and then you add high renewals and that takes the cake lol...

 

[Jeff Tackett]

True that. I, like many others, get attached to a name and keep renewing it for years...I just dropped a useless domain I have kept dragging along for a decade. It was not easy...some tears and light sobbing, but I let it go. It still has not found a new home...

You couldnt sell it on Letgo?

 

[Mister Funsky]

You couldnt sell it on Letgo?

Never been to letgo before...there are a surprising number of old shoes there from people in my area...wow. Think it it the perfect place to list my yard sale stuff!

 

[Fancy.domains]

.net used to be the #1 alternative extension if the .com was being used or had an unrealistic asking price. We now have some 500 alternate extensions. Some are newer than .net but who considers a three to five year old car or laptop or cell phone new? .net makes more sense for a web presence than .top or.xyz and most other post-2013 releases. But yes selling .net domains even for good keywords is not easy. I have dropped about 90 percent of the .net domains I once owned. So why would I pay a premium price plus renewals for another hard to sell unheard of extension?

With new gTLDs, the combination of keyword and extension means a lot.

I have even sold names in “strange” extensions such as .vodka, .horse, .beer and .bike, just because the combination made a lot of sense for the buyer / company.

 

[johnnie018]

Actual numbers lend weight to the general consensus on this thread.

A November report from CENTR showed that over the previous year, dot com grew by 5 percent, while dot net declined by 6 percent. And dot info declined by a huge 17 percent.

However, dot org held the line strongly (despite the powerful wave of 500 new gTLDs) and only declined a tiny half of one percent.

I feel this is because of its unique and trusted identity, while dot net is just a second choice after dot com and lacks personality.

Dot info has probably declined so much because there are now so many competitive new extensions on offer.

You can download the report - “CENTRstats Global TLD Report Q3 2018 – Edition 25” from this link (PDF):


I think you have to be careful before comparing growth in dot coms (which are basically “sold out”) with all other extensions because they mostly have many unregistered but meaningful names still available.

Also, dot top had massive growth according to the report, but you have to consider that that string probably had ridiculous low price promotions. (Dot top is currently losing massive amounts of registrations since the report was released.)

The next report may well be very different.

An extension declining 0.5% in a year is not holding any line "strongly" I'm afraid. That is a bad sign for .org. Either it will reverse or it is the start of a slow slide down.

In what way is .com "sold out", it is still seeing good growth.

 

[Josytal]

With .net already being a poor-performing contraction,
can't understand the logic of having .network among new gTLDs.
Repeating failure?!

 

[Southtexas81]

The internet is still young. What you think you know is not the reality. New Tech companies are dominating the markets. .Net will be king one day in my opinion in the tech world and .org's I like them a lot because I can visualize in the long run that .org's will be more popular than .net's and possibly equal in value to .com's all because of their multi purpose use. gTLD's are a joke. No end user ever heard of them except for domainers. Ask anyone and they will laugh that a .store, .energy, .cash, .house etc. even exist.

gTLD's are a lot like bitcoin. Its a thing now to investors but will devalue greatly in the long run because their is no true realistic value to owning it.

 

[BrandableDomain]

An extension declining 0.5% in a year is not holding any line "strongly" I'm afraid. That is a bad sign for .org. Either it will reverse or it is the start of a slow slide down.

In what way is .com "sold out", it is still seeing good growth.

I know what you’re saying, dot com is showing numerically solid growth around 5 percent. But the growth is mainly quantity not quality.

So what I mean is, 99.5 percent of good valuable names have already been registered, so the dot com industry is mostly you and me and everyone all chasing after the same names, whether they drop or are auctioned or whatever.

Of course there are new themes like AI and robotics or some new tech or cultural phenomenon but these can’t account for the millions of new dot com registrations. Only a tiny fraction.

If there are about 135M dot coms, then 5 percent would be about 6.75M. You couldn’t possibly find even 100,000 names worth hand regging in one year.

Almost all the 6.75M must either be junk, or companies buying up thousands of names for projects that have value to them or defensive reasons etc etc.

Sometimes DotWeekly or DomainNameWire publishes names that companies register - hundreds at a time.

So Amazon might reg WholefoodsSeattle, WholefoodsNewYork, WholefoodsLosAngeles, WholefoodsMiami etc. These kinds of names are not relevant to the aftermarket. But they add to the dot com numbers.

When I say “sold out” I mean good and valuable names. Startups have difficulty finding a decent name at a fair price.

Since dot info declined by 17 percent, I continue to believe that dot org only declining by 0.5 percent is a convincing sign of strength.

 

[LeDomain]

.net , never branded right, they were the .com alternative, poor man's .com . The old marketing rule - try to be No.1 in a new market/category and don't take on the behemoth head on. .NET failed in both of those.

As some have mentioned. CCTLD's are No.1 in their markets or atleast they can make the claim to be the most focussed for the Country Market. If you own the best cctld domain in your niche, you can argue you have the best domaiin in Germany, UK, Canada or India etc. They are not taking on .com headon

.org has a specific purpose and its clear branding

.info/.biz all hanging around with no direction mostly

new gtlds - at best they can be #1 in their small niche, if people know where to put the dot. You need enough end users to support you, with marketing efforts. Registries wont have enough resources to keep pushing it.

 

[jmcc]

An extension declining 0.5% in a year is not holding any line "strongly" I'm afraid. That is a bad sign for .org. Either it will reverse or it is the start of a slow slide down.

If one looks at .ORG's decline in purely domainer terms, it is bad. However, it is actually a good thing. The .ORG registry decided to stop discounting promotions. These have been used to inflate zonefiles with domain names that will not be renewed. Some new gTLDs have almost a 99% replacement of their zonefile over a year or so. By stopping discounting, many junk registrations will wash out of .ORG TLD. This reduces the number of domain names but increases the quality of the TLD. There are less junk and webspam registrations. Usage and development rates increase and the end users begin to consider the TLD as bein better than others. That means that resale values of good domain names in the TLD should also begin to rise.

The .NET has also used discounting to grow registration volumes but it has been in decline for about ten years. Anyone who claims that its decline is due to new gTLDs is wrong. Discounted registrations have a low renewal rate. The .COM's renewal rate for first year registrations is about 56%. About 44% of .COM registrations today will not renew next year.

It is quite dangerous to rely upon domain name counts as an indication of the health of a TLD. Usage, development and renewal rates are far stronger indicators. The .NET is finding it harder to compete at a country market level with ccTLDs and the domain name business is realigning itself along a .COM/ccTLD axis which represents over 80% of the market in most countries. It is dependent on brand protection registrations to maintain its numbers. Brand protection registrations are good. They keep renewing but they are rarely used for websites or e-mail. When these registrations start dropping in a TLD, a TLD has serious problems. At the moment, many of these brand protection registrations are continuing to renew so it is not all doom and gloom for .NET TLD.

Regards...jmcc

 

[jmcc]

I suspect Verisign is milking this cow and hoping that the drop-off rate is lower than the annual rate increase. It may also plow the road for the .COM price increases that they are wanting to push through and therefore the .NET becomes the thin edge of the wedge.

The blended renewal rate for .NET is still quite strong, Rob,
Its first year renewals,which Verisign does not publish are about 20% lower in some months. (I track both rates for legacy and new gTLDs. The first year renewal rates in some NGTs are horrifying (0.55%) and astonishing (>70%) depending on the gTLD.) Verisign has also been using discounting to keep the volumes up and some Chinese registrars that have had large numbers of discounted registrations have dire renewal rates. The brand protection nature of many .NET registrations means that this increase will be absorbed by registrants. There is a rapidly fracturing geography of renewal rates and some countries have strong renewal rates and others poor. The price increases will affect markets differently and the increases may be ignored but .NET may be a test bench for what Verisign will do on a larger scale with .COM TLD. The problem for Verisign is that the demand for .NET has been declining and it is shifting to newer markets. The momentum of new registrations, in terms of the country of the registrant, is quite different to historical registration patterns. It may well be that Verisign knows it can increase prices with .NET due to the brand protection registrations but .COM is a far more complex problem that will require it to continue using discounting in some country level markets.

Regards...jmcc

 

[garptrader]

Yes registration stats are not a good indicator of an extension's strength if they are the result of heavily discounted registrations. Recall the 1 cent or $1 promos? How much development takes place in an extension? If companies consider a tld worth their time they might consider paying a premium for an aftermarket domain. However small companies usually go for alternative extensions to avoid the aftermarket.

 

[garptrader]

Note that .biz has more than two million registrations - more than nearly all the "new" extensions but for experienced investors is considered a waste of money.

 

[johnnie018]

I know what you’re saying, dot com is showing numerically solid growth around 5 percent. But the growth is mainly quantity not quality.

So what I mean is, 99.5 percent of good valuable names have already been registered, so the dot com industry is mostly you and me and everyone all chasing after the same names, whether they drop or are auctioned or whatever.

Of course there are new themes like AI and robotics or some new tech or cultural phenomenon but these can’t account for the millions of new dot com registrations. Only a tiny fraction.

If there are about 135M dot coms, then 5 percent would be about 6.75M. You couldn’t possibly find even 100,000 names worth hand regging in one year.

Almost all the 6.75M must either be junk, or companies buying up thousands of names for projects that have value to them or defensive reasons etc etc.

Sometimes DotWeekly or DomainNameWire publishes names that companies register - hundreds at a time.

So Amazon might reg WholefoodsSeattle, WholefoodsNewYork, WholefoodsLosAngeles, WholefoodsMiami etc. These kinds of names are not relevant to the aftermarket. But they add to the dot com numbers.

When I say “sold out” I mean good and valuable names. Startups have difficulty finding a decent name at a fair price.

Since dot info declined by 17 percent, I continue to believe that dot org only declining by 0.5 percent is a convincing sign of strength.

You are missing it completely, those new tlds that you think are "good", they are junk because the tld is bad. More and more money is going to .com. It is a remarkable thing that new tlds are 5 years old and they are already growing slower than .com, their market share is actually falling, demand is falling, interest is falling.

You going to keep registering these names as the goalposts get shifted further and further away? Will you keep thinking up excuses about how the scoreboard is wrong?

 

[jmcc]

Yes registration stats are not a good indicator of an extension's strength if they are the result of heavily discounted registrations. Recall the 1 cent or $1 promos? How much development takes place in an extension?

It is much less than people think. Even with .COM, the active % can be around 30%. With a full new gTLD survey,one of the larger new gTLDs, had an active figure of 2,116 sites. The rest were mainly porn landers, gambling landers and holding pages on an NGT with over 2 million domain names (December 2018 survey).

Regards...jmcc