Haven’t posted over the past month or so due to the fact that someone was crazy enough to sign up for a lifetime of me 🙂

After planning/organizing the wedding, getting married and enjoying our honeymoon (got back in town yesterday night), it’s time for a huge list of thoughts about the industry, about my own plans and all that good stuff. Let’s get started:

1) With short domain values still soft, a lot of people are in denial and whenever there’s a day when prices tick up, they think a slingshot move to the upside is just around the corner. A few days ago for example, LLLL dot com chip prices were up from slightly below 8,000 CNY to 8700-ish during one day. This made some domainers overly excited and unfortunately, they ended up being disappointed. Prices moved back down and as I am typing this, they’re at just slightly below 7,500 CNY. So not only did prices not continue skyrocketing, they’re down to under the level they were at before the spike up.

The same thing happened with numerics about a month or so ago. Please understand that we’re currently in a downtrend. Don’t get giddy whenever prices tick up. Wait. Maybe they’ll go up again sustainably, maybe not. I don’t know. I just know that now is the time to be level-headed

2) New gTLDs are starting to be sold at very *very* low prices, even $0.01 a pop. Registries and/or registrars have to be losing quite a bit of money on this deal, as ICANN fees as well as fees to the backend provider have to be paid. Why is this happening? Most likely because registries want to copy the Dot Info approach. For a very long time, Dot Infos were dirt cheap compared to other TLDs. Lots of them were regged for nefarious reasons, lots of low quality sites were created. However, this strategy kind of ended up working for Dot Info because the renewal rates ended up being reasonable.

In my opinion however, this will not work for new gTLDs. Yes, it worked for Dot Info because there weren’t that many choices out there at that point. Now, however, with so many strings to choose from, it’s a race to the bottom which might not have any winners. Registries will most likely end up losing money due to this approach, domainers will waste not so much money (because 10 bucks is enough to get you 1,000 $0.01 domains) but rather time (which is money anyway), I don’t really see any good coming out of this

3) Other registries such as Donuts are hiking prices for some of their strings. This is most likely due to the fact that there are not enough domains registered in those strings and as such, the numbers don’t make sense. The registries probably believe risk vs. reward ratio associated with the increase (50% if I’m not mistaken, a very big hike) is decent. In other words, I’m sure they expect a drop in volume but believe that even with this drop in volume, they’ll end up ultimately generating more revenue. Perhaps they will. Either way, those strings are not good opportunities for domainers, the holding costs would eat you alive

4) All in all, the entire new gTLD process has been a mess in my opinion. ICANN shouldn’t have made some stupid mistakes, like allowing misleadingly similar TLDs like Dot Law + Dot Lawyer + Dot Attorney + Dot Attorneys + Dot Esq+ Dot Legal to exist but c’est la vie, the damage has been done. I don’t consider new g’s a good investment option for domainers. Not saying it’s impossible to make money with them, I’m just saying I for one see better uses for my time + capital

5) Shane Bellone has quit domaining. Can’t say I was a huge fan of his writing style (too in-your-face for my taste) but I think (without knowing him; we’ve never communicated, so everything I write is just my best guess)his heart was in the right place. Exposing Adam Dicker helped a lot of people avoid losing money, this was without a doubt his biggest contribution and I respect him for that. My opinion is that he’s leaving because he ultimately realized that being a voice in the domaining industry isn’t as rewarding as most people think.

And he’d be right. I’ve been running DomainingTips for several (~8) years and while some people might think everything we bloggers touch turns into gold, they’re wrong. Dead wrong. The money DomainingTips makes is peanuts, it really is. Especially since I don’t recommend new gTLDs, which tends to make this blog a not-so-popular destination for new gTLD advertisers. Working hard (and make no mistake, it is hard work) without adequate financial rewards is frequently quite frustrating

6) My One Minute Economics YouTube channel is growing nicely. I currently have 13 published videos (will try to publish one per week from now on), 231 subscribers and several videos which have done well: one with ~5,000 views, one at ~3,500 and so on. Nothing that breaks YouTube’s servers but decent nonetheless. Just like with DomainingTips however, the money aspect isn’t great at all.

I just hope that once I launch my book (probably late this year), DomainingTips readers as well as One Minute Economics viewers will help me by buying it, leaving me reviews and sharing it with their friends. The book will cost 4 or 5 bucks, leaving a review on Amazon will take a minute and sharing on Facebook shouldn’t take longer either. Yet if enough people do it, the results will be career-altering for me. I just hope people actually do it. When it comes to reading your content or watching your videos, a lot of people are all for it. However, when it comes to actually supporting the person who publishes that content, most folks look the other way, I have no idea what to expect

7) We’re probably heading towards a new financial crisis. I’m not a psychic so I can’t be 100% sure but so many pieces are lining up that I for one am worried. However, this doesn’t mean we should become doom and gloomers. I’d just recommend preparing yourself now rather than later, all while continuing to work hard but also enjoying life!

That’s it for now guys. Come to think of it, today’s list isn’t actually *that* huge but I’ll stop for now because as of this point, I’ll start posting again, so I don’t want to bore you to death right from day one 🙂