This might be the most common fallacy (as explained yesterday, a fallacy is basically a logical error) I’ve come across in the domaining industry and I’m glad I’ll be able to address it today.

In latin, “non sequitur” means “it does not follow” and as the name suggests, this logical error occurs when the conclusion doesn’t derive from the premise.

Maybe the premise is true, maybe it isn’t, the error is represented by the fact that the conclusion cannot be drawn based on that premise.

The best way to explain this is through an example.

Premise: dot com is king and will remain the Internet’s #1 extension.

Conclusion: new gTLDs are bad investment opportunities.

In our case, the premise is true.

Is dot com king? Yes.

Will it remain the Internet’s #1 extension? Yes, most likely.

Does this mean that new gTLDs are bad investment opportunities?

No.

New gTLDs may or may not be bad investment opportunities but such a conclusion definitely cannot be drawn from our premise and it’s exactly why we are dealing with a non sequitur.

Why?

Well let’s assume you buy a LLL dot com for 4 figures and sell it a few years later for 2x more than what you paid for it. Good job!

But history has taught us that even in the “old” gTLDs, it was possible to buy some of the best domains at low prices and flip them for not 2x but 10x+ times more.

Therefore, we cannot generalize.

For those who made the right investment choices, even the “old” gTLDs represented good investment opportunities, so it’s fairly safe to assume that the same principle will be valid when it comes to the new ones as well.

Does this mean everyone will make money via new gTLDs?

No.

Does this mean most people will make money via new gTLDs?

I don’t know, time will tell how things will unfold.

It simply means that generalizing by saying something along the lines of “New gTLDs will fail because dot com is king and will remain the Internet’s #1 extension” is a logical error, in our case a non sequitur 🙂