Does history repeat itself?
Today, it’s time to get philosophical on DomainingTips. When it comes to new extensions, one interesting argument is represented by the fact that some people say history will simply repeat itself. While there have been individual success stories when it comes to extensions such as Dot Mobi, Dot TV and so on, domain investors have for the most part done poorly.
Now don’t get me wrong, I was actually one of the people who did reasonably well investing in .TV domains, for example. But at the same time, I have to be intellectually honest and admit that all in all, extensions such as .TV, .Mobi, .Co and so on have been poor performers from a domain investing standpoint.
As an economist rather than a domainer, I come across the question as to whether or not history repeats itself rather frequently. In my honest opinion, history does not repeat itself but it does tend to rhyme, if you catch my drift. By saying that history repeats itself, I would be assuming that I’m able to predict the future by analyzing the past. That is definitely not the case, nobody can.
On the other hand though, we can and should look at the past with our eyes and the mind wide open because it does provide compelling arguments. Moving back to domains, if extensions such as .Mobi, .Co and .TV have been relatively poor performers for domain investors up until this point, it shouldn’t make us dismiss new gTLDs altogether.
It should however make us exponentially more careful or to put it differently, it should make us think not twice but then times before allocating capital towards something that has performed poorly in the past. Maybe this will change in the future, I’m not a psychic, I have no way of knowing for sure. What I can say, however, is that you should be considerably more careful when investing in new extensions that when investing in something which has proven itself and which stood the test of time.
Fair enough?
September 4th, 2015 at 4:07 pm
There is one huge difference that needs to be taken into account with this round of new gtld’s and that is the huge number of new extensions hitting the market in a short time span.Will this create a tipping point in the acceptance of alternatives to the .com. This time around the technology for accessing the internet is wide spread where in the case of the .com’s most of the premium names were already registered 10 years before the most of us were even on the internet. As many have said before , even with all the new extensions the inventory of really good names is still scarce. This is proven over and over again when we look at the registration numbers of the ngtld’s in the first week or so of availability. Someone made an interesting yet so true comment the other day when they stated that if the renewal price of a .com went up considerably, half the .com”s would be dropped in the first year.
September 4th, 2015 at 5:00 pm
Robin,
There is always “one huge difference” with every new release, if there wasn’t very few domainers would invest. Probably better to see the similarities rather than the differences.
September 5th, 2015 at 6:15 am
I think the bigger issue is that even though domains like
.TV and .Co and .info have caught on, dozens of other old extensions have not, so it is hard to predict which ones will do well. It may be that many new extensions do very well, but predicting which ones is the hard part.
September 5th, 2015 at 8:44 am
Seems obvious to me that all the new gtlds are destined to fail, as they already have done before. Bad idea then. Bad idea now. Stick with .Com only.
September 5th, 2015 at 9:16 am
Poopa – I am not pro gtlds, but many things take a while to catch on (computers, cell phone, TVs, VCRs, microwaves, etc.) so just because the old ones failed do not mean the new ones will. What has changed is not the new domains themselves, but that consumers now accept them better (partially due to the huge marketing push).
September 5th, 2015 at 10:15 am
I see both sides of this because I am a .com investor and a new GTLD investor. Here are some free-form opinions I’ve spoken before, but will repeat here:
— .com will remain the largest single GTLD (unless google gets .WEB)
— the growth opportunity in New GTLDs is greater because we are going from zero to millions whereas .com is already in the millions.
— I wouldn’t judge any one new extension against dot com, but rather all new extensions against .com
— there is definitely a consumer acceptance this time around relating to New GTLDs which wasn’t present with previous extension launches, because there are so many of them this time around and many are really good.
— Each registry is reserving premium registrations which hold back supply in the same way domainers do in .com
— There is value and there are real secondary market transactions happening in new GTLD extensions at astonishing prices. These things are real.
— This is a marathon, not a sprint. .COM was launched in 1985 but didn’t find it’s feet for 10 years (until 1995). New extensions will be the same.
— .COM is New York City but this is like 1900 and there are lots of great cities yet to be built in the West.
— All the new investment in new GTLDs is bringing additional infrastructure investment which is making all domains more valuable. For example, I built Uniregistry because of new GTLDs and that registrar is proving invaluable for registrants to manage large volumes of names across hundreds of extensions as well as large scale registrants of .COM. More infrastructure is coming, with more innovation, more ways to unlock value, all because of the kickoff of the new GTLD program.
— there will be a round 2 of new GTLDs with thousands of new brands. Most people in the domain industry will eventually own a new GTLD themselves or a domain name in a new GTLD extension.
— there are going to be more abc.xyz like moments with each passing week, then they will come daily one day, then there will be so many of them that we will stop talking about them.
— We are still just at the beginning.
September 5th, 2015 at 12:10 pm
It is easy to explain to ignorant people who have no knowledge about domains.
But, it is very difficult to discuss with people who know the fact but still support new gTLDs with bad intentions.
I do not have ultra-premium .coms. Still, I am receiving more inquiring on my .coms than in the past year. At least $1000 inquiry once in 2-3 days.
Occasional use by some brands/occasional big sales with not make them successful.
September 5th, 2015 at 7:02 pm
Fair article but Frank brings up a lot of great points. Com is king for a long time to come, but some of the new TLDs will rise substantially as technology becomes faster and prevalent.- it’s more about value to the end-user, if they like your content, they will remember your address and come back. Lot’s of apps load websites and don’t even show the URLs, especially on Wechat. If you market your website right, no one will really mind if its .com or .xyz (years from now atleast :P), as long as you provide value, your visitors/users will remember your address.
S.
September 6th, 2015 at 2:00 am
The main issue is that it’s as impossible to get great combinations in newgtlds as it is in .com – then as an investor, where is the advantage?
And with the registries holding back the best names, there’s no profit in the also ran names.
And the ones they do make available, the prices / renewals are crazy – $3k/yr seems to be the average, given that most domains are sold in the $1k-$5k range, that makes ‘investing’ in newgtlds a misnomer.