An eventful week and a time for domainers to analyze their portfolio

By: RH

It was an eventful week with the "big reveal" by ICANN. Applications for a .mango, a .apple and a .orange. I am surprised there was no .banana,(although there was one for bananarepublic) because it certainly was bananas this week in the domain industry.

People are already getting hyped up about the situation. People on both sides with no shades of grey.

• Dot Com is king
• All these tlds will do is leak traffic to the .com
• This will screw up email and vital emails will get lost

Then the other side has their rhetoric

• Yay .com squatters will no longer make millions
• .Com is no longer king
• The public will have no problem understanding these because they are intuitive

You can see the seeds of this in a thread on Namepros.com http://www.namepros.com/domain-name-discussion/760524-death-change-in-domains.html

The title alone tells you things are already heating up. I actually believe domain forums will see a pick up in traffic as many come to give their opinion and go at it with their ideological opposites.

The old .mobi threads were legendary and now we should see that times 1000.

There will be no new extensions for at least nine months and most probably longer than that. For domainers .homedepot or .apple does not really matter, they are extensions that are not for domainers in the first place.

It will be the generic extensions like .shop,.web,.site that domainers will care about. These extensions depending on who wins the extension, will probably be open to all registrants. These are extensions that may see interest from those end users who cannot or will not pay .com prices.

So now domainers have some lead time to prune their third tier names, names that are not the big one word, category defining names, the super short, easy to spell brandable. The names to be looking at selling before the new extensions come will be long tail domains with little search volume. The hard to spell only you think they sound good, etc... If the new tlds catch on a lot of these names lose the most value and even if the new tlds don't go crazy, they will still be an attractive alternative to a so so .com.

There is no need to panic but rather take a hard look at your portfolio and maybe look to sell some of these names now rather than later.

This is not a zero sum game, .com and your favorite cc tld can do well and some new extensions can do ok too.  If .web does 500,000 registration in the first year, the Castello Brothers will still be kicking butt on PalmSprings.com, people will still want to buy LLL.com domains and people will still argue the merits of .mobi.

Comments

[Dman]

should be interesting...

[New Domainer]

I agree about the forum traffic picking up. I don't know what is going on in domaining anymore.

[Ned]

A lot of names become worthless. 4 word dot coms make no sense when you can get a useful one word .tld