In my opinion, the best approach for those who want to secure a new gTLD domain or several new gTLD domains is pre-registering with more than one company.
I don’t own many new gTLDs and my data is therefore inconclusive at this point, so I won’t say which company/companies performed better for me thus far (I will however do this in the future, once I have more data) but up until this point, I’ve had interesting “surprises” as in seeing that the company I would have expected the least from a while back manage to secure the domain on the one hand and seeing a registrar I had higher expectations from screw up royally on the other.
Also, it’s not like you’re throwing money out the window by pre-registering with more than one registrar. Sure, you’re blocking capital initially, since you have to pay upfront each time you pre-register but that doesn’t matter since you’ll receive refunds from every company aside from the one which managed to secure the domain.
The pre-registration process itself still has many flaws and it’s to be expected given the fact that new gTLDs are so, well… new 🙂
For this reason, having the right pre-registration strategy can make the difference between getting the “best of the best” for that particular extension and settling for what’s left after other domainers cherry picked.
June 16th, 2014 at 10:30 pm
I would argue that the best way to save money is to not overestimate the end user sales potential of the new TLDs. There are some cool-sounding combinations but a common response I often get when marketing my own domains is “we already have a website domain.” When you look at their domain you know it wouldn’t even sell for $10 on a domain forum but they are perfectly happy because even though their business has employees and office rent plus utilities and marketing expenses they don’t see the need to spend more than $10 on a domain name. Of course there are exceptions but the reported five and six-figure domain sales are not the norm.
June 17th, 2014 at 4:10 am
@Leonard Britt: I agree that the end user potential shouldn’t be overestimated but the same principle is valid when it comes to dot com domains caught after they were dropped in my opinion. Sure, they’re dot coms and that’s an advantage but a lot of those domains are pretty much worthless because the term on the left of the dot is extremely weak.
Therefore, we’re dealing with an interesting dilemma: very strong term on the left of the dot + unproven extension or considerably weaker term on the left of the dot + dot com.
Now of course, getting strong and very strong terms on the left of the dot + dot com would be the best case scenario but in a lot of situations, the acquisition price would be so high that the upside potential would end up being (severely) limited.