.uk/.com vs. new gTLD's

I think we should put this important discussion on the new gTLD's in a decent thread.

Scenario 1.
The new gTLD's get real traction, 6 months in people are going crazy and are
desperate register a domain under every extension under the sun. Demand out strips supply - the values of the new TLD's climb at an astronomical rate and truly rival the best .com's and .uk's. Search Engines gobble up the new extensions like hungry pigs. People start dumping their trusty .com's and .uk's to be part of the latest domain fashion. A true Internet revolution has begun.

Scenario 2.
6 months into the new gTLD launch and already 99% are a complete flop. The hype has gone, the speculators have left town with burnt fingers. New gTLD owners are sick of explaining to the average person that widget.something is actually a domain name - even after resorting to marketing it as www.widget.something

Search Engines see the new gTLD's as nothing better than a .biz on a good day. Decent .com's and .uk's rise in value as users realise the tried and tested, established extensions are the sensible option.

Perhaps both of these are wrong and there is middle ground on both, your thoughts..

 

personally I think they will do well. Either way they wont be going anywhere and you will always have people trying to reg the (non TM) million pound domains.

 

I would guess a lot more 2 than 1

The prices of the new gtlds I think will put most of the average people off & stop them becoming widely adopted.

 

We're already at scenario 2.

 

Thinking too short-term imo, and too much like domain investors and not end-users.

Traction will come over time and will ultimately be driven by big-brand take up. If they have little take up after 3 yrs I'd be concerned, 6months is not long enough.

Don't see much in the investment potential of the tld's unless a very high context meaning, and most of those will have been taken/accounted for in the sunrise period.

 

So its basically just the same thing that happened about 15 years ago - 99% of all the best domains are taken at sunrise, joe public ends up with the reg-fee dregs, the domainer cycle continues regardless if new gTLD is a success or not.

But are they a threat long term to .com and .uk..?

 

No, imo. ccTLD's & .com will - for the foreseeable future - be in charge.

Remember, most domains in the uk are .co.uk and for a business there are significant branding costs involved to change this, particularly to a non-uk domain.

The immediate uptake will be defensive and new personal/business regs which will be a very small proportion.

The landscape is changing and as I've mentioned before we'll eventually get to a point where even bits of your house will have a domain e.g. address.heating.

 

The vast majority are doomed to fail, no doubt about it. There are just too many being launched and it's a small market. I take the point that things are changing tech-wise and bits of your house could have a domain etc but I don't imagine annual domain renewal fees would be paid by people or their gas supplier e.g. paying for address.heating. For that sort of networking surely free subdomains would be used like the free hosting ISPs offer.

I can imagine there might be some new gtlds that will be free and could do very well indeed - if blogger got .blog and gave away free .blog names for example. But for the for sale new gtlds most will surely fail. When .info and .biz were launched there was an initial rush to register the best names by domainers. But neither has become a credible alternative to .com. Within a few years they were so desperate they even gave away .info domains for free in the hope that a reasonable proportion would be renewed a year later. And at least those were short extensions and versatile in use. But now we have long clunky extensions and absurd stuff like .horse on offer!

If each of the 700+ new gtlds got 1/700th of the small alternative domain pie then they would have such a tiny share of a small pie they would all be doomed. But it is more likely that a smaller number of extensions do gain some traction (I could see .london being quite popular for example), which would leave the rest of the 700 with even less than 1/700th of the small pie and in terrible trouble!

Even the more popular new gtlds will never run into the 10s of millions of registrations like .com because once you get beyond a few hundred thousand registrations all the generics, the surnames, the 2 and 3 letter names etc - everything of any value - is gone. Then a potential registrant looking to register a widgets domain, upon checking .crap and seeing that widgets.crap is gone, would not put up with mywidgets.crap, widgetsonline.crap or widgetsshop.crap as people do with .com. Instead he would go with another one of the 700 new tlds and look for widgets.shit etc instead. So very few of them will be likely to get into the millions of registrations or pose a serious threat to .com.

Another issue is information in the market - how can people be informed about the new gtlds in practical terms? How could a big registrar inform a visitor who is on their website and looking up domains for his keyword/ company name about the 700 new alternatives? Nobody would want to trawl through a list of that 700+ alternatives, so the registrars will most likely filter out most of them, utterly annihilating what was already a tiny chance of a registration for the majority of the 700 tlds.

 

Vast majority of business wouldn’t give a toss about the extension its the listing high that matters ? if they believe the new Tld's promise them that they'll reg them ? Cant see Search engines giving a toss either they'll favour whichever makes them the most revenue?

 

A gTLD extension isn't going to give you anything in SE's. Just get the domain you want & go to webmaster tools and make sure it's set to the right location.

 

New gTLDs have hardly failed for the owners.

Donut's .guru hit 40,000 registrations last month (after 1-2 months of availability), which is 40,000 x $50 = $2 million per yr in revenue already. Assuming the domains are renewed for another 2 years that's $6 million projected revenue for a single domain extension that's been launched for less than 6 months.

Not bad.

Most other new gTLDs have got at least 10,000 registrations already.

 

If you want to target more than one country, you're screwed. Best bet is to get .com/.net/.org in those situations.

My thoughts on the original topic: Big spike, followed by a big decline of most of them (especially longer or vaguer ones). If you're buying, buy as soon as possible and sell as soon as possible whilst interest is still high.

 

A new GTLD can make a boatload of money for the registry and still be a "failure" if it's of no earthly use to anyone else. If you look at who's registering the vast majority of new GTLD, it's domain investors. They're not going to be building sites on the names and promoting them (which would start to build mindshare for the extension amongst the general public)

In fact, the registries don't have to sell a single domain to make a profit - there's plenty of loot to be made by being "bought out" of seemingly juicy contention sets. It wouldn't surprise me if the large players (hundreds of TLD strings) are cash positive even before anyone registers a domain since the cost of acquiring the rights to a contended TLD can easily go into the millions - and that gets split by the "losers" of the contention set.

Think of it like people selling you the chance to "name a star" (or a lunar crater). Sure, you can receive a nice certificate with "your" star/crater pinpointed on it in exchange for your readies, but it makes not a jot of difference to anyone else.

So if you define "new GTLD success" as "SOMEONE makes money from the new GTLD" then yes, they probably are a success because (many of) the registries are going to wind up in the black.

If you define "new GTLD success" as "an extension that actually has value, commercial benefits, resale potential, etc." then they're out and out failures.

Since I'm looking at it from a domain investment perspective, they're clear "out and out failures" to me!

 

Frank Schilling and the rise of the web domain name industry article in the FT http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/1b74bbec-9fa2-11e3-b6c7-00144feab7de.html#axzz2wPvcgLJK

 

Excuse me ? Although it's early, only a handful of new TLDs have crossed the 5 figures.

You can see some figures here:
http://www.registrarstats.com/TLDDomainCounts.aspx
but there are dozens more TLDs.

And if you look at the number of new regs on a day to day basis, they are extremely low, considering that interest is usually at a climax in the early stages. New extensions quickly fall into oblivion.

The market is speaking, and it's always right.

 

Thank for the link! very interesting.

How accurate is it? do some of them really only have one registered domain

 

It's not about the owners, the owners know there are enough people to register names, at least to make it viable for them.
It's about the extensions getting enough traction to gain public awareness.
I think .biz has got about 3million and how many people are using them.
And don't forget when all the "good ones" have gone there is little room for expansion.

 

It's accurate (though around 48 hours behind "reality"). The ones with one registered domain are delegated but not open to registrants yet - the single registration is likely to be "nic.extension" or similar and reserved for the registry.

 

Indeed. They'll be some real catchy ones that you won't be able to help but like. The registration volume is one indicator. I'd be more inclined to work from a renewal/drop % a year 2 years from now.

My view is some big companies will brand around these, like some have with the .co. It will be very few, but still create some interest in those tlds. Ultimately this spreads the butter a bit thinner, but with increased population and what not, I doubt 5 years from now it will ever make much difference. If I want a UK site I'll still put in UK/Com .com for US, .de for German and .BG for Bulgarian.

To the average consumer a lengthy TLD is going to come across unprofessional.