Why uk domains Value are down?

[yousifdhym]

I was just wondering why uk domains Value not any were near .coms and even the good names I saw in auction site are veeeery cheap,
LLL.com could go up to X,xxx,xxx while the same name in the .co.uk is X,xxx and some times not even 1% of the .com price !!!
Uk is a big country with big businesses and good money then why ?
you opinions are appreciated

 

[phablet]

I was just wondering why uk domains Value not any were near .coms and even the good names I saw in auction site are veeeery cheap,
LLL.com could go up to X,xxx,xxx while the same name in the .co.uk is X,xxx and some times not even 1% of the .com price !!!
Uk is a big country with big businesses and good money then why ?
you opinions are appreciated

They haven't gained much traction yet i don't think.. but they have potential.. I have a few sites that look better when using the .uk domain for it's email systems..

Some normal non tech/non web savvy people don't know all about the new extensions and still think you are relating to the .co.uk.. so if you base a business on a .uk domain you could lose huge traffic to the .co.uk which would be your rival.

It's always best to own both as a pair if possible..

In addition to avoid losing any emails to .co.uk we also have a catch all redirect on that to push to the .uk..

 

[yousifdhym]

They haven't gained much traction yet i don't think.. but they have potential.. I have a few sites that look better when using the .uk domain for it's email systems..

Some normal non tech/non web savvy people don't know all about the new extensions and still think you are relating to the .co.uk.. so if you base a business on a .uk domain you could lose huge traffic to the .co.uk which would be your rival.

It's always best to own both as a pair if possible..

In addition to avoid losing any emails to .co.uk we also have a catch all redirect on that to push to the .uk..

Hi
I don't mean .uk only
I mean .co.uk and .uk
for .uk i understand but for .co.uk i can't understand , why the values of the .co.uk domains are soooo down ?

 

[martin-s]

Simple. Worldwide competition on .com, but only UK-wide on .co.uk.

 

[yousifdhym]

Simple. Worldwide competition on .com, but only UK-wide on .co.uk.

I see that but still the prices are waaaaaay to low
if i have a uk based business I will go for a .co.uk
beside (to me) its more Classy;-)

 

[bensd]

There's always been a massive gap between prices.

Also, .co.uk prices (especially LLL.co.uk) have softened over the last few years due to several factors.

 

[websaway]

The chances are if someone wants a premium .com they are going to be

Faaaaaaar bigger than those that want a country domain.

But sales and prices in both are down.

 

[accelerator]

Simple. Worldwide competition on .com, but only UK-wide on .co.uk.

I agree with this. .com is THE global domain extension of choice. So, any other extension, not just the .co.uk/.uk, will be only a fraction of the price. Market size is way bigger for the .com in terms of potential end users for the domain.

 

[gimpydog]

I was just wondering why uk domains Value not any were near .coms .....some times not even 1% of the .com price !!!

Asked & answered....

.UK = 60million potential customers

.com = 7 billion potential customers

so, UK market "not even 1% of the .com"

That may be a simplistic view, but, it is what it is.

 

[jasman]

Well firstly I don't agree that in general .com domains are worth 100 times as much as .co.uk ones. No doubt they are worth much much more but that seems too high an average to me.

The main 3 reasons are:

1. .com domains theoretically have global demand, so potentially 100 times the number of people interested

2. Global potential: it would look odd to us if a popular global site had a .fr extension. For global presence it has to be a gtld.

3. .com is the de facto national domain for the US since it became established as such long before .us became available to the public. The US having a population about 5 times the size of the UK and the world's strongest economy provides demand an order of magnitude higher than UK national demand for .uk. .Com also better reflects the aspirations of the US corporate establishment (i.e. the members of the Council on Foreign Relations) as their plan is for global domination in a global economy backed by global government.

There are other reasons too such as:

4. .com domains have proven to hold their value whereas .co.uk prices by comparison have become more volatile in recent years, not least because of Nominet's former management's handling of the .uk debacle.

5. Many investors believe that the huge number of new tlds becoming available and the confusion arising therein will only result in .com staying king, as the competing extensions will be too risky a choice for a website, especially one with big financial backing.

 

[jasman]

Also I think up until now having a global presence without a .com i.e. on a .net or .biz or .info has been something of an embarrassment. This might chnage if any of the new tlds get traction e.g. if most banks start using .bank.

 

[markb]

.co.uk domains do seem to have dropped in value of sales recently compared to 5 to 10 years ago, there where many more uk domains sold for higher prices.

The main reasons I can think of are :

1) Google - They made it more difficult to rank for keywords in your domain name. Before, if you had an exact match domain. you could usually rank in the top 10 with little or no work.

2) Uncertainty in the UK domain market due to nominet bringing out .uk domains.

3) Possibly the introduction of many other extensions, and maybe the increase in apps which obviously do not need domain names.


I do still think that there is a good demand for short, memorable, fantastic uk domains, but good sales are few and far between nowadays, even for great domains. This could be in part, due to people holding on to their domains until the value increases.

 

[philiporchard]

I guess some .co.uk domains - especially at the top end - get sold privately and prices aren't disclosed.

 

[gimpydog]

... not least because of Nominet's former management's handling of the .uk debacle.

Nominet did what they always do & took the path of least resistance.

They are still a company controlled by a membership 'with skin in the game'.

Corporate governance is still an open sore. Until that changes, I believe they will just lurch from one constitutional crisis to the next.

 

[humble pie]

I just think the market is still shaking out from recession, ngtlds, new .uk, a GE - is that enough?

I would say early next year we will really know if the death knell is ringing for nGTLD's (if not already). :twisted:

For some reason domains have taken a back seat in marketing depts. of late, but hey you still need em' for your website and email don't you know..

 

[ian]

The UK domains are weak versus the potential of COM domains. If you want a brand that potentially can go worldwide, you'd be crazy to consider anything but .com - which is what I'm having to do at the moment.

The messy split of .co.uk and .uk hasn't helped either; thank Nominet for that one.

Aside from private sales, there is an ever decreasing number of regular buyers, though thankfully they do continue to buy for now.

 

[humble pie]

But given there are far more 'local' businesses than global, .UK should be
a home run any moment now! (tumbleweeds)

I mean the Internet's still here , people are still rolling out websites and UK startups almost daily, things have moved on from a technical and branding perspective, agencies are generally more clued up are they not..? Thus one would have thought a demand for better domains for projects.

Perhaps we've all become .uk domain pessimists after such a flogging

And it is all rosy.

The UK domains are weak versus the potential of COM domains. If you want a brand that potentially can go worldwide, you'd be crazy to consider anything but .com - which is what I'm having to do at the moment.

 

[markb]

The UK domains are weak versus the potential of COM domains. If you want a brand that potentially can go worldwide, you'd be crazy to consider anything but .com - which is what I'm having to do at the moment.

The messy split of .co.uk and .uk hasn't helped either; thank Nominet for that one.

Aside from private sales, there is an ever decreasing number of regular buyers, though thankfully they do continue to buy for now.

.com domains are extremely expensive for smaller uk businesses and anyway the majority of uk businesses use uk domains rather than .com. Some companies get on ok without their .com domain, for example next.co.uk

I do think uk domains have a good future still, there just seems to be a lull at the moment.

 

[ian]

.com domains are extremely expensive for smaller uk businesses and anyway the majority of uk businesses use uk domains rather than .com. Some companies get on ok without their .com domain, for example next.co.uk

I do think uk domains have a good future still, there just seems to be a lull at the moment.

I don't disagree, I operate 2 large businesses using .co.uk domains, even though I own the .com's too; but that is due to legacy, if I was starting them again now, as I am with another, I'd be keen to increase the budget significantly for a .com, but only if of quality (which I appreciate many start up businesses can't justify).

 

[WalkinDude]

The ntld's may in fact have pushed the price of dotcoms up. The .com is about the only domain that says to the world this is the one we wanted, everything else is inferior.

Soon as you own any other domain your defacto position is 'couldn't acquire the dotcom of this' position.

Ideally you want to own both.

Now there are so many new domain suffixes the problem is exacerbated and .com is the only accepted solution to it.

The costs of owning every single variation of your online address plus the admin and rest of it is far to much for most entrepreneurs.

You can imagine Facebook and HP happy to spend 50k a year protecting their 'online brand' by registering everything suffix but most won't and just register a 'quirky' dotcom and that's that until they grow to a size that justifies the other outlay.

The market is driven by startups and the overall effect is to push .com even further on it's own as the premium suffix whilst everything below it is a bit of a mess now.

From a UK perspective the .co.uk isn't what it was in the sense there's probably a couple of thousand .co.uk's generics that are absolute top draw but the rest what's really to be gained from a web point of view now that Google delivers such precision searches it considers content far more important than what domain name it's on.

Offline a decent .co.uk does a lot for brand simplicity and marketing but online the surge in popularity of marketing via social networks other networks, hashtags, and all the rest of it has taken quite a lot of the air out of the .co.uk market. The difficulty difference between opening a facebook/instagram/twitter etc account and getting up and running and buying a domain name and building a viable website, the gap in difficulty is so huge it's no different to what digital downloads have done to physical storage of data like CD's and DVD's etc.

The downside of social network marketing is that you don't really own much of a distinct brand that you can add value to. But I find most of today's generation are either not aware of this or feel it's something they'll sort out later.

On top of this maybe a decade or more ago the top generic domain names were the highest value domain names. If you asked someone what would be your ideal domain to own they'd say money.com

yet who actually ever uses that website? Ive never even been on it.

Since then the value of top .com brand domains outstrips the value of generics by many orders of magnitude and people are becoming aware of this. The generic domain name has basically lost the war against the brandable and for any young entrepreneur is a no brainer to think of a snazzy brandable and add value to it rather than think how do i raise £XXXXX money to get that top generic to start my business.