analysis Why Ntlds will never work

[Revisiting]

Easy to discuss the almost hidden 'dot' and the market and users lack of awareness. So lets move on to the public mind-set that will ultimately reject Ntlds (except for maybe a very few)
I've mentioned in another post - how it actually took our introduction to the internet and it's many want to be users many years to be become comfortable with the 'No space between' two/three word presentation of a domain. Anybody under about 30 years of age won't connect with that these days .
So lets move on.

The internet awareness and value system is built on returns. The connection is built on a basic reward system and IT-WORKS. The reason .biz .info and the REST didn't find their mark is because there was nothing new or to be gained. Sure key word searchers would visit, but unless it was a very niche site or a business card website - there was no gain for a visit.

So lets get to the crutch - There is nothing to be offered in the Ntld space outside of the recognised TLD parameters - Sure, and I do appreciate Inventiveness, Creativity and WordArt which will take us all by surprise from time to time. But What you cant do - is reinvent the connectivity of what is already there

Ntlds will be seen as an opportunistic field by domain speculators - An unrecognised - So yet to be trusted 'Input/address field' by users . And finally totally oblivious for Marketing purposes (You can't make a miniscule dot stand out for connectivity/readability - unless it's intuitive)

Happy (and want to read the counters) I'm always eager to learn

 

[HotKey]

There is no hope guys.

There is no hope for these new-fangled things called new gTLDs. They just don't make any sense.. they are EXOTIC.. they are HACKS.. they simply can't be TRUSTED! I mean why would anyone buy them? Why would anyone brand on something that is a shorter, more exact domain name? They even work exactly the same as, well, a domain name should. Absolutely ridiculous. These people must be nuts:

Gift • Horse
Universe • XYZ
Infra • Market
Alpaca • Markets
Suspicious • Link
Robot • One
Xito • One (and they didn't even register the dot-com, OMG!!)
Mosquito • Buzz
Mast • One
Blackhole • Dev
GiddyUp • Horse
LisaFranklin • London
Life • Church
Unique • One
Drawing • Garden
Wonder • One
Awake • One
Cognitive • Business
Feet • City
Pik • One
Timely • Town
Spotted • Horse
Synchroni • City
Riddles • FYI
Made • Men
Goodbye • Domains
Fox • One
Block • One (forwarded to a CC.com, pretty cool)
Animal • Farm
All • Storage

I mean, how will these businesses possibly survive?? On a domain name that works?? With an exact match to their brand?? Insane.

Yeah I know. Hardly an indicator. I'm no researcher, and why would I hold a quality domain to just its merit? It's just a few new gTLDs as examples, and really no indication of anything happening. Except for the fact they are live and in use. Not to mention as investors, why would we invest in anything that's not immediately apparent as a forthcoming mass appeal? It's not like we hold things for years on end, maybe even up to 20 years for it to realize its right buyer.

And what about this talk about demand and sales? Like seriously, with over a thousand new gTLDs for end users to choose from, we REALLY should be using the same yardstick as we have been for the .com extension (which has only been around since 1985, sheesh. Yesterday really.).

Look, we really should ignore all the gTLD sales and write them off as outliers. I mean, that's all they'll ever be, right? Particularly since they only add up to a few mil. We need tens or hundreds of millions for it to really be concrete, don't we?

There is no hope. Stick with what we know. While we're at it, let's ride that horse and buggy over to the automobile convention.

 

[HotKey]

Use searchbox...
Tons of such holywars... they appear regularly...

Yeah, surprisingly it's been a while though. I don't think the OP ever really participated in the previous ones and rehashing gets tiresome.

What's kinda neat though is since the last anti-non-comm ting ting we've had, there's been plenty of nG adoption and sales to boot. The growth rate is good enough for me, nice and slow, and couldn't give a hoot whether or not it's big enough or fast enough for the nay nayers.

 

[ryan29]

from NameBio

Is that site a good indicator of end user sales or is it for domain investors only? I went to it and after about 3 searches it gave me a modal (blocking) dialog box with a 45 second forced wait and a prompt to become a premium user. Lol. No thanks. I'm not paying to see what they have to sell. That's hilariously dumb if they're trying to sell aftermarket domains. If they're catering to domain investors, the numbers are going to favor .com more than reality.

I'm not a domain investor, but I think the nTLDs are slowly catching on. I think they'd be doing much better if the registries weren't so awful, but, subjectively, I see them getting used more and more all the time. The two specific things that make me think the tide is turning for them is that I see a lot more nTLD links on the Hacker News front page and I've started seeing more traditional advertising from businesses using nTLDs.

There's a dentist in my city that uses a .dental domain and they advertise it on the radio. That's a regular small business that decided a nTLD was their best option for branding. The .com variant (ex: exampledental.com) is $4k USD in the aftermarket.

I don't think nTLD adoption is something that will be obvious though. One day it'll just be normal / accepted unless the registries come up with more money grab(s) that keep damaging adoption. For example, I can think of several businesses that do a lot of radio advertising in my city that could benefit from nTLDs because they'd be easier to communicate via radio, but when I look up domains that would be awesome for them they registries have all of those domains flagged as premium with ridiculous prices.

I would love to see a breakdown of premium vs non-premium registrations in the nTLD market. I'd also love to see the financials for a nTLD registrar to see how they do the accounting on domains that have been reclassified as premium (after a reg / drop cycle), but I doubt that'll ever happen.

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

Use searchbox...
Tons of such holywars... they appear regularly...

 

[bmugford]

Respectfully,

you don’t know what you’re talking about, and that’s alright, learning the ropes in the domain industry is not an easy task.

That’s coming from someone who has represented some of the most rare .com domains in the world including VR.com, 77.com SW.com HH.com and 123.com ... all of this before becoming an investor in new GTLDs ^ in fact I have to be thankful and hopeful that both sides of the industry will continue to appreciate and in my experience, when we work together, the industry grows ^

~

So here’s the math ... according to ICANN, in 2019, we had approximately 360M domains in circulation, we had 2B sites online, there are over 100K new businesses’ on average created every single day (not taking into account the Pandemic situation) ... And in order for a new business to survive in the current world we live in,

you need to be online !

Now with that said ^ it is impossible for every single business in the world to own a .com name, hence single keywords have hit six and seven figure price tags ... that said, unfortunately most of those sales fall through, financed arrangements don’t go according to plan or the buyer is not serious ... don’t take my word for it ... just go look at the news, ebanking.com just fell through, fish.com fell through, bird.com fell through ... I was just offered $300K for the name https://e.credit and the buyer is being hesitant ...

that’s just how the industry works, it’s very complicated and highly unpredictable, anyone w/ experience will tell you the same

Let’s look at some facts, do you know what Twitch is ? I’d be hard pressed to think you didn’t, well go type in Twitch.com and tell me what you see ... it will forward to .tv

Moving on, Shopify developed out https://shop.app - they bought the name for $200,000 USD ... what do you think has happened to the value of shopapp.com - that’s right ^ it’s gone up ^

Next we have Google, their Corporate Landing page is https://abc.xyz

Funny enough, Google has a secret domain acquisition group for new extensions alone,

https://techcrunch.com/2012/06/13/how-tech-giants-are-playing-the-icann-domain-game/amp/

so now think about this ^ this is the largest search engine in the world, the year is 2012 ... wow they were ahead of us and look at where the value of certain GTLDs has gone and will continue to go ^ exact match keywords in valuable industries are very valuable, from an SEO perspective and a brandability perspective

Next we have Apple ... Apple is quiet, but go look up https://apple.watch and even though it forwards to their .com for apple watches - it still shows that Apple actually took the time to adopt a new idea, invest the time and money into it, and then utilize the name effectively ^ now if we could just get them to market the name in Timesquare

Next we have Amazon ? Type in https://amazon.shop or https://amazon.store and see where they go ^ in fact go look at how many domain extensions .whatever Amazon owns ^ they are not burning money, this is arguably one of the most powerful companies in the world besides say Blackrock and voila ^ you have Fortune 100 companies whom have been secretly investing, either to control market share, make money, or because they think it’s a good idea ... And it is

Does it surprise you, that Verisign whom owns .com owns .tv and .web ... They paid $100M USD in 2000 for a 20 year contract just to own and sell .tv domains ? Despite telling all of their investors to solely invest in .com domains ... actually if you think about it, it’s kind of brilliant, they don’t want you as an investor knowing what’s to come, nor do they “Personally” send you a notice when they decide to Raise the renewals ... this goes for all domains ^ they love keeping secrets until it’s time to show you the bill

And the domain registrars and registries need to work on this as a whole ^ we cannot have greedy hedge-funds controlling our market ^ nor can we successfully keep this market alive by trading amongst each other

And so that leaves us w/ an industry that is successfully marketing and utilizing new .extensions

~

What gets people drooling ?

Crypto

Fintech, NFTS, and DeFi, the majority of these new start ups that became unicorns overnight are using .network, .finance, .credit .link -

https://chain.link

https://polkadot.network

https://uniswap.io

https://bitcoin.org

https://ethereum.org

The list goes on ^

These are the companies that needed something that they could build a brand upon, not spend countless money competing w/ the banks whom own already own the direct keywords and some have even been intelligent enough to buy into new age marketing -

Citi Bank “https://mortgage.biz”

That all said, the past 10 years have been interesting, I myself have generated an ROI of 3000% w/ just a few names, I have to thank ROTD for that as well,

I believe I’m on the cusp of the next big GTLD sale which hopefully bring further added value to the domain industry that we so desperately need

Two halves make a whole

Back on Earth 1....

Reported sales (from NameBio) in the last year -

All nGTLD -

1,627 Total Sales
$2.7m Dollar Volume

.COM only -

126,700 Total Sales
138.5M Dollar Volume

1000+ new extensions have yielded 1.9% of the dollar volume of just .COM in the last year.

Math. Empirical data. Not impressive.

The rhetoric does not match the reality.

Brad

 

[bmugford]

i dont know with dot city unless its like discount.city, the geo names are more library oriented than business oriented. It seems business names with city in them would make more since for a website.

Rob Monster and DigitalTown had a spectacular failure with the .city extension when it came to GEOs.

The company owned 10K+ .city domains.

DigitalTown “clean up efforts” to avoid bankruptcy

https://domainnamewire.com/2019/06/06/digitaltown-clean-up-efforts-to-avoid-bankruptcy/

 

[bmugford]

The first of these extensions launched almost 8 years ago now. I don't think they can really be considered "new" anymore.

Many of the biggest proponents seem to have dropped off the face of the Earth.

While some still sell here and there, there is no way 8 years later the proponents would have predicted this little overall traction.

The registries themselves share much of the blame. While I don't think they were really ever going to take over, the greedy and shady behavior of many registries didn't help anything. Neither did the grandiose, delusional predictions from the ".COM is dead" or ".COM is AM radio" crowd.

Brad

 

[Alessandro Couteau]

Respectfully,

you don’t know what you’re talking about, and that’s alright, learning the ropes in the domain industry is not an easy task.

That’s coming from someone who has represented some of the most rare .com domains in the world including VR.com, 77.com SW.com HH.com and 123.com ... all of this before becoming an investor in new GTLDs ^ in fact I have to be thankful and hopeful that both sides of the industry will continue to appreciate and in my experience, when we work together, the industry grows ^

~

So here’s the math ... according to ICANN, in 2019, we had approximately 360M domains in circulation, we had 2B sites online, there are over 100K new businesses’ on average created every single day (not taking into account the Pandemic situation) ... And in order for a new business to survive in the current world we live in,

you need to be online !

Now with that said ^ it is impossible for every single business in the world to own a .com name, hence single keywords have hit six and seven figure price tags ... that said, unfortunately most of those sales fall through, financed arrangements don’t go according to plan or the buyer is not serious ... don’t take my word for it ... just go look at the news, ebanking.com just fell through, fish.com fell through, bird.com fell through ... I was just offered $300K for the name https://e.credit and the buyer is being hesitant ...

that’s just how the industry works, it’s very complicated and highly unpredictable, anyone w/ experience will tell you the same

Let’s look at some facts, do you know what Twitch is ? I’d be hard pressed to think you didn’t, well go type in Twitch.com and tell me what you see ... it will forward to .tv

Moving on, Shopify developed out https://shop.app - they bought the name for $200,000 USD ... what do you think has happened to the value of shopapp.com - that’s right ^ it’s gone up ^

Next we have Google, their Corporate Landing page is https://abc.xyz

Funny enough, Google has a secret domain acquisition group for new extensions alone,

https://techcrunch.com/2012/06/13/how-tech-giants-are-playing-the-icann-domain-game/amp/

so now think about this ^ this is the largest search engine in the world, the year is 2012 ... wow they were ahead of us and look at where the value of certain GTLDs has gone and will continue to go ^ exact match keywords in valuable industries are very valuable, from an SEO perspective and a brandability perspective

Next we have Apple ... Apple is quiet, but go look up https://apple.watch and even though it forwards to their .com for apple watches - it still shows that Apple actually took the time to adopt a new idea, invest the time and money into it, and then utilize the name effectively ^ now if we could just get them to market the name in Timesquare

Next we have Amazon ? Type in https://amazon.shop or https://amazon.store and see where they go ^ in fact go look at how many domain extensions .whatever Amazon owns ^ they are not burning money, this is arguably one of the most powerful companies in the world besides say Blackrock and voila ^ you have Fortune 100 companies whom have been secretly investing, either to control market share, make money, or because they think it’s a good idea ... And it is

Does it surprise you, that Verisign whom owns .com owns .tv and .web ... They paid $100M USD in 2000 for a 20 year contract just to own and sell .tv domains ? Despite telling all of their investors to solely invest in .com domains ... actually if you think about it, it’s kind of brilliant, they don’t want you as an investor knowing what’s to come, nor do they “Personally” send you a notice when they decide to Raise the renewals ... this goes for all domains ^ they love keeping secrets until it’s time to show you the bill

And the domain registrars and registries need to work on this as a whole ^ we cannot have greedy hedge-funds controlling our market ^ nor can we successfully keep this market alive by trading amongst each other

And so that leaves us w/ an industry that is successfully marketing and utilizing new .extensions

~

What gets people drooling ?

Crypto

Fintech, NFTS, and DeFi, the majority of these new start ups that became unicorns overnight are using .network, .finance, .credit .link -

https://chain.link

https://polkadot.network

https://uniswap.io

https://bitcoin.org

https://ethereum.org

The list goes on ^

These are the companies that needed something that they could build a brand upon, not spend countless money competing w/ the banks whom own already own the direct keywords and some have even been intelligent enough to buy into new age marketing -

Citi Bank “https://mortgage.biz”

That all said, the past 10 years have been interesting, I myself have generated an ROI of 3000% w/ just a few names, I have to thank ROTD for that as well,

I believe I’m on the cusp of the next big GTLD sale which hopefully will bring further added value to the domain industry that we so desperately need

Two halves make a whole

 

[bmugford]

Give it enough time, and I promise you, in about 15 years if you’re still in the industry you will be investing in both GTLDs and TLDs ^

maybe you already do

I would be willing to invest in them now if they had more traction and resale potential. I am not fundamentally against great two word combos, but the vast majority of these are not available.

Many have been reserved from day one by the registries who are demanding large registration and/or renewal fees for them. They really shot themselves in the foot, as getting traction would have been far more effective.

Brad

 

[Alessandro Couteau]

I would be willing to invest in them now if they had more traction and resale potential. I am not fundamentally against great two word combos, but the vast majority of these are not available.

Many have been reserved from day one by the registries who are demanding large registration and/or renewal fees for them. They really shot themselves in the foot, as getting traction would have been far more effective.

Brad

I agree, rare combinations are rare, I’m lucky to co own https://easy.credit - been in negotiations w/ TeamBank for a solid 3 years

I believe you have a solid point w/ registries reserving premium domains for themselves, .com got successful because it let the small guy win ^ that’s true ^ but today that’s not the case, you’re happy to disagree, because you earn that nice paycheck or bankwire transfer ^

I believe what we need is time, but not a considerable amount of time, new age tech valuations are already through the roof, shoot just look at NFTs, if we could produce the same results w/ domains we could potentially open up a new window to bring in a force much more great then you or I

 

[Lox]

In my business network, an important question that comes up frequently is, “How much does it cost to create a trust with .whatever?”

Unfortunately, the exotic registries didn't invest in mainstream media ads ... to raise awareness.

 

[jmcc]

Not really. My argument is the lack of reported sales reflects the reality that a lack of demand exists.

That's the killer for a TLD, Brad,
The demand for many of the new gTLDs had collapsed with the end of large-scale Domain Tasting in 2008. The whole new gTLD train was already trundling down the tracks and couldn't be stopped.

No demand = No development = No sales.

In the last (3) years .CITY has 18 reported sales for $12,600 total dollars. Also, none of those sales really appear to be GEOs.

The Geos are a strange bunch. The Digital Town thing almost killed .BOSTON and damaged .LONDON. Some of the Geos are finding a niche but they are directly competing with their local ccTLDs. In some respects, it is a kind of frenemy relationship and it has helped with brand protection registations in the Geos. Many of these are small businesses without trademarks protecting their brands.

Regards...jmcc

 

[Grego85]

Its pretty simple.

The less one understands about NGTLDs, the less cartilage that person probably has left in their knees. It seems to be directly relational.

 

[Alessandro Couteau]

Rob Monster and DigitalTown had a spectacular failure with the .city extension when it came to GEOs.

The company owned 10K+ .city domains.

DigitalTown “clean up efforts” to avoid bankruptcy

https://domainnamewire.com/2019/06/06/digitaltown-clean-up-efforts-to-avoid-bankruptcy/

I already know about this, I wanted to tell Monster he shouldn’t invest so much, at the end of the day it’s about quality over quantity

And not every extension is gonna be successful, it would be ridiculous to think this is the case

Two keyword combos or single characters though that make sense, I believe are very valuable

 

[Henry Y]

Building a model of NGT and .COM performance is actually a lot more complex than building a model for a startup. The .COM is a much older gTLD than any of the NGTs. The renewal rate and registration years are also quite different as are the renewal rates. Some of the heavily discounted NGTs have low renewal rates. That's simple enough to understand. What isn't widely understood is that the .COM gTLD is actually a composite of a lot of country level markets with a much smaller global market. Renewal rates and sales prices vary according to the economics of these markets. Some of the NGTs are incredibly geographically focused to the extent that they are pseudo-ccTLDs. (The geo NGTs are good examples of this.) NGT sales are typically high-value keywords or large companies taking a gamble. There are smaller sales but the problem most of the NGTs face is that there is not much of a primary market let alone a secondary market.

Regards...jmcc

It is already incorrect to group ngTLDs for analysis because each ngTLD has distinct niche markets and pricing models.

 

[bmugford]

I agree, rare combinations are rare, I’m lucky to co own https://easy.credit - been in negotiations w/ TeamBank for a solid 3 years

I believe you have a solid point w/ registries reserving premium domains for themselves, .com got successful because it let the small guy win ^ that’s true ^ but today that’s not the case, you’re happy to disagree, because you earn that nice paycheck or bankwire transfer ^

I believe what we need is time, but not a considerable amount of time, new age tech valuations are already through the roof, shoot just look at NFTs, if we could produce the same results w/ domains we could potentially open up a new window to bring in a force much more great then you or I

Yeah, combos like easy.credit sure. Real.Estate, Wedding.Photography, Home.Loans, Carpet.Cleaning...those type are good.

What is not good IMO is like CarpetCleaning.(some random new extension). It basically means many extensions only have a handful of great combos.

Brad

 

[HotKey]

Grego, your Fire • Horse DN is badass! Love it.

 

[Henry Y]

Not really. My argument is the lack of reported sales reflects the reality that a lack of demand exists.

Brad

I disagree.

Reported sales only account for a very small proportion of all sales, are mainly domainer-domainer sales, and ignore domain registrations. They cannot reflect end user side and cannot show domain usages, and hence cannot reflect demand.

You should use the statistics about domain usages to show the demand.

 

[Henry Y]

Back on Earth 1....

Reported sales (from NameBio) in the last year -

All nGTLD -

1,627 Total Sales
$2.7m Dollar Volume

.COM only -

126,700 Total Sales
138.5M Dollar Volume

1000+ new extensions have yielded 1.9% of the dollar volume of just .COM in the last year.

Math. Empirical data. Not impressive.

The rhetoric does not match the reality.

Brad

It is a typical wrong application of math and statistics. Have you ever seen any investment analysts comparing revenue of a big company to that of a new startup? Never as it is meaningless and cannot conclude if the new startup performs well or not. They use ratios, such as asset turnover ratio, to do fair comparisons instead. Similarly, you should use ratios, such as the ratio of reported sales to total domain registrations, to do the comparison.

Also, you better do a trend analysis to see the performances of .com and ngTLDs over the past few years in order to have a bigger picture of the reality.

 

[bmugford]

There are endless unreported .Com sales as well.

There is no reason there would be a higher % of ntlds unreported.

Low reported sales = low overall sales.

Brad

 

[DuDD]

People's awareness of NewTLD is not high enough
. Com is still the best choice that people think.
However, it is also the case

 

[Revisiting]

I'm hoping to hear from the ntld investors. There is a valuable discussion to be had

I do think there is a market to be had, but it will be far more a . . 'promotional event' concept

 

[Dodoma_com]

My hometown is Roanoke City and my wife's hometown is Kigali City. I was able to get both "Roanoke" and "Kigali" in the ".city" domain, at reg fee, both around $25 or $30 annually.

It was apparently some freakish coincidence that they were available (recently expired?), as all the other cities in those regions are taken, including smaller towns.

I wouldn't trust Donuts on future pricing, but if I seriously launched a project involving either of those cities, I would register 10 years in advance and use multiple domains in my marketing, including .com's. In fact, the main site would probably be a ".com," but the exact-match .city domains would be helpful redirection tools to gain "instant credibility."

In general I wouldn't register any of the nTLD's unless it's one of these situations: where it's an existing, well-known two-word combination, and the top level domain corresponds to the second word, and the second level corresponds to the first word.

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

I never heard about these cities, sorry.