Rob Hall Of Pool.com on The Coming New gTLD’s : If I Was A Big Domain Holder I Would Start Dumping Domains
Today at opening session of the Dot Nxt conference entitled: Setting the Scene, a questions was asked what would you tell large domain holders in anticipation of hundreds or thousands of new gTLD’s
Rob Hall of Pool.com made stated “if I was an owner of a large amount of two, three and four word .com’s I would dump them as new gTLD generic terms will be worth more than the .com equivalent in the future.”
“If I owned Shoes.com I would probably keep it, but if I owned Greatshoes.com, or GreatShoesforsale.com I would dump them”
I spoke to Rob for a while after the session to get further clarification and he used the example of “Ottawa Pizza”
Rob thinks that once there is a .Ottawa and a .Pizza the domain names Pizza.Ottawa or Ottawa.Pizza would both be worth substantially more than OttawaPizza.com.
I asked assuming if GreatPizza.com is worth $50K today what would it be worth a few after say a .Pizza is live.
He said there would be an immediate loss of 20K in value and the decline in value would continue but slow.
Finally he asked me to tell him a domain I owned, so I said Stuff.com.
“So would you rather own Stuff.com or .Stuff for $185K?
“If you owned the TLD don’t you think you could sell 10,000 registrations a year at $10 or make $100K a year.”
Maybe you would sell 50,000 registrations a year and now make $500,000 a year and that would be an annuity in perpetuity.
“So why wouldn’t you sell your generic .com’s and use the money to fund new gTLD’s”
Its certainly a radical approach to domains and one I haven’t heard anyone discuss so boldly an publicly.
So what do you guys think.
Do you think the additional choices in the domain space will cause value of other than bang on one word generic to fall?
Would you rather own stuff.com or .stuff?
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@LindaM
I will stick with CheapPizza.com.
Would you be expected to also pick up all the spoils from .travel and .museum and all the other “existing” failed pioneers as well.
Costs of mgmt and maintenance on .stuff would make it a liability, and who’d want a .stuff name any way?
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wikipedia .org/wiki/Stuff_(magazine)
“Stuff is a men’s magazine featuring reviews of consumer electronics , and other articles of interest to a predominantly male audience.”
Operating a TLD (without the ICANN overhead) is trivial.
The Applicant-Based ICANN system appears to be doomed.
It is fascinating the lawyers can not imagine another way to make .STUFF
ICANN was supposed to have some technical focus, that did not happen.
Now free market forces and CODE (software) will have to shape the future.
Just because I fancy .pizza does not mean I give a ringing endorsement to all possible new tld, I said earlier lots of them of them will be fail from the start, for a variety of reasons.
.pizza *imo* is massively monetisable on a global level, if deployed properly will be LOVED by google, and basically – if a strong player wins it then I would rate it highly. Also imo these kind of potential new tld like .pizza .loan etc are hugely different to .mobi .aero .museum and other obvious pre-fails.
Ive noticed that a section of domainers are very black and white in thinking, imo there is no reason why the owners of ottawapizza.com and ottawa.pizza cannot both live in mansions. All Im saying is that the owner of .pizza has the potential for a mansion in every town, just like the pizza.com guy.
.pizza *imo* is massively monetisable on a global level
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1. The OLD SCHOOL Internet Pioneers (Clerics Czars) do not want people making money off THEIR Internet [ Note: they have no problem charging you $185,000 to try and $25,000 per year to continue trying ]
2. The OLD SCHOOL Internet Pioneers (Clerics Czars) would prefer that Mega Pizza Corporation of the World own .PIZZA and do NOTHING with it to prevent anyone from making money with it.
3. IF you {game the system} (in their view) and somehow get control of .PIZZA then they will work to derail you in other ways. Governments love their methods.
One really has to re-visit the old NSF days when everything had to be portrayed as some sort of Cooperative Agreement with many winners. High-profile individuals have a very hard time against the I* Lobbyists.
@MHB
In all honesty at their current prices I don’t want either of those.
Why would I want to spend 185k application fee (plus the 25k yearly fee and another 500k for getting it operational) on .stuff which is based on a keyword that is not in the top 500 as far as popularity and demand goes.
Now if these fees and expenses went down drastically in the future (and I couldn’t get a better keyword) I might give .stuff a shot.
Same goes for the domain, why would I want to pay top dollars to get a .com domain at the current prices when there is a chance that it might not be worth as much in couple of years once so many better gTLDs got a hold over the market. The only way I would pay top dollars for a .com domain right now would be if it was already an established online business that was making a lot of money, or that I could recoup my initial investment in a year or two by monetizing the domain itself and even then I would still factor in all the risks with how it might be affected once all those new gTLDs got operational.
The most practical and popular domains and the most practical and popular new gTLDs will rise to the top, everything else will be marginalized.
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All this talk of pizza is making my mouth water…
@ojohn:
You should acquire Stuff.com because the chances are much better than not that after 2014 dotCom will rise sharply in value.
Advice to all those who think the new gTLds will be golden. Why wait? You can jump in NOW and invest in killer gTLDs like dotTravel, dotName and dotJobs
These new extensions are just a huge, immediate profit center for Icann (as if they need more cash). The more they roll out, the more they flood the marketplace and dilute the value of all of them. I think .com will always be the main ticket to the internet naming space. The only new extension I would want is .bullshit and make it a directory of failed new extension roll outs (but I would perfer to do it with bullshit.com).
@SAteve Obrien
There is already one created called “BullS” and it is worth Billion$$$
ill say it a million times. its a .fail or as future headlines will read “.bust” where is the identifier that its on the internet and not a typo in marketing. Google will have a hell of a time trying to add all of these gTLDs and lets not forget that each registry will need to make deals with the registrars to sell these gTLDs. How is a consumer suppose to know a url is get.pizza? if you saw that would you automatically think oh thats a URL? or are we going to move backwards and start typing in www again?
I know we are tech savvy people but to try to explain to my parents that its http://www.get.pizza they will automatically say or type. http://www.get.pizza.com?
This is going to be an internet clusterfuck.
What domain investors are not aware of is that we aren’t going to live for ever, it is only our generation that got used to listening to blABlBLA.COM. There are new generations coming, kids today are the men of tomorrow, they will get used to.anything just like we men of today got used to hearing .com when we were kids yesterday. It’s just a matter of time until they grow up, it’s just a matter of a few years till the new city get new people moving in to it, the real estate owners of the old city will have less chances to sell as the opportunities in the new city costs less, they will have less opportunities but I don’t know if what they own will go down in value, I guess it depends on what they own.
Rob Hall Of Pool.com on The Coming New gTLD’s : If I Was A Big Domain Holder I Would Start Dumping Domains
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The FREE dotTK (.TK) top level domain may give people some ideas of what is coming
All of the other major changes coming to DNS will be based on FREE
China and Microsoft just signed a deal to leverage FREE Linux
FREE sells very well to the masses
from GCN .COM Aug 25, 2011
Microsoft has announced a new deal with China Standard Software Co. Ltd.
The new interoperability and legal agreement with CS2C was inked Aug. 23 as part of a Linux server partnership deal. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Microsoft’s announcement indicated that the goal is to “jointly develop, market and sell solutions for the booming cloud-computing market in China.” CS2C sells Linux-based server and desktop operating system products in China.
Microsoft’s partnership with the company is associated with CS2C’s NeoKylin Linux Server.
The deal involves a technical collaboration on Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization technology plus the signing of a “mutually beneficial customer covenant agreement.
I had published an article on Business Insider indicating the misinformation circulating about the new TLDs, largely because I had seen far too many mainstream articles with sentiments similar to Rob’s.
People are making the false assumption that just because there could now finally be what are currently power words in the domain space to the right of the dot for once that people will start gravitating to those domains. IF it ever happens, it would take at least a decade if not more, partially because it will take that long for a significant amount of those extensions to be in play. I personally doubt that shift will ever happen.
The biggest thing the new TLDs are fighting against is expectation. .com is winning because people still expect businesses to be on .com (and to a limited degree .org, .net and some ccTLDs). ICANN in limiting the amount of applications and the extensive cost of applying for and operating an extension will combine to stifle any possibility that people will expect sites to be on a .word relevant to the site. Mostly sizable companies will be applying for extensions given the costs involved, and most of them will feel better served with their .brand instead of a .generic
“people will start gravitating to those domains. IF it ever happens, it would take at least a decade if not more”
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You may be under-estimating the power of Mobile edge devices and software in Access Points for those devices.
If China starts shipping NEW.DNS agile devices (per Microsoft + Linux specs) the ICANN game can be over quickly
ICANN may evolve to be the Adult.Content Platform (Walled Garden) which China and M$ will not likely promote
The current ICANN CEO likely wants to jump ship before the XXX crowd dominates his road-shows. The CES show in Vegas ebbed and flowed with the
same issues for years. There are now distinct venues.
Two Internets – ICANN.XXX and China.MS
With 95 million “.coms” vs. 14 million or less for other TLDs (http://alagna.com/2011/tld-statistics-numbers-in-various-gtlds-as-of-february-2011_110) I don’t think the value of “.com” domains will drop that much.
On the contrary, the prices of any new TLDs will be inflated during their “land rush” period and then fall off within the first couple years after their introduction.
BTW, if you want me to watch for any specific keywords as I’m going through the lists of expired and deleting domains, follow and comment on this page: https://plus.google.com/b/116054614305339390789/